Author: Jeremy
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Dust-off
I’m returning to writing more, and more long-form. I love being witty and bantering short-form on Twitter as @trochee, and I don’t expect this to stop. I’m just putting a lot of work into this site over the next few weeks. [alternate subtitle: Dust-off and nuke the entire site from orbit; it’s the only way to be…
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Defended against criticism and immune to praise
Sometimes reading the comments can be illuminating to the psychology of coders. The comments on this wonderful post on assumptions about names are a case in point. Confronted with a long list of assumptions, about a third of the commenters angrily insist that THEIR particular (wrong) assumptions don’t matter in the “important cases” (e.g. “to…
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Leaving LA
“Data Science” in this era, like “Cognitive Science” in the nineties, seems to be several intellectual neighborhoods in search of a city.
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don’t say I didn’t warn you
Apropos of this collaboration model thinking, I note that Doug Cutting is looking to “rock band” after all.
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CDH3 on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin
I find myself typing the most absurd search strings (they read like lexical Tourette’s or XKCD passwords): pseudocluster ubuntu precise pangolin cloudera cdh3 I spent a while getting my new laptop set up with a Cloudera CDH3 Hadoop pseudo-distributed cluster. But I really wish I’d had the following instructions, simplified off the web with some help from…
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“Grad school” is a collaboration anti-pattern
To quote Wikipedia: an anti-pattern is: a pattern used in social or business operations or software engineering that may be commonly used but is ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice. [emphasis mine] I’ve been exploring patterns for actually working on software — not for designing it — and I realized that I myself spent a lot of time…
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“Bank heist” collaboration pattern
Here’s my favorite collaboration pattern so far: the Bank Heist collaboration pattern. This pattern, which we know from The A-Team, Ocean’s 11 and Leverage, among others, shares many properties with an excellent developer team: You don’t have to like following orders to be on the team. Everybody’s a generalist, and an expert in one area (pickpocket, cat burglar, safe-cracker, grifter, etc)…
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Software collaboration patterns
Software development is a fundamentally social process: it’s all about working together. We (software developers as a caste) have expressions like “programming by contract” and design patterns like “Delegation” that reflect how we humans work together – and we use these patterns to describe how we instruct our robot minions to function. We think about…
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As random as I oughta be
From John D. Cook‘s Probability Facts twitter feed, discovered the infamous RANDU, and this absolutely marvelous quote: One of us recalls producing a “random” plot with only 11 planes, and being told by his computer center’s programming consultant that he had misused the random number generator: “We guarantee that each number is random individually, but we…
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Recommendations roundup for “TPC”
My brother Daniel introduced me to a new term he and his security-geek friends are trying to encourage the rest of us mere mortals to adopt: “TPC”, or “Trusted Physical Console”. In short, it’s the sturdy, small laptop running a trusted operating system, to which you (and probably only you) have control of the tools available. (Probably…