Category Archives: programming

“Grad school” is a collaboration anti-pattern

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Jeremy

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in academics, linguistics, Patterns, programming, work | 10 Comments

“Bank heist” collaboration pattern

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Jeremy

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. … Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns, programming, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Software collaboration patterns

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Jeremy

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in Patterns, programming | Tagged , | 20 Comments

As random as I oughta be

Posted on March 7, 2013 by Jeremy

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in information theory, math, programming | 1 Comment

Recommendations roundup for “TPC”

Posted on March 3, 2013 by Jeremy

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 … Continue reading →

Posted in programming, work | 6 Comments

pair programming

Posted on April 7, 2012 by Jeremy

I discovered last week that Java does not have a Pair<X,Y> generic class because of Reasons. That’s annoying, but surprising to me. Scala, for example, supports heterogeneous typed tuples (including a 2-tuple, of course), and of course my beloved Python … Continue reading →

Posted in linguistics, math, programming | 2 Comments

Looking for work, 2012 edition

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Jeremy

A short note (implied by my updates on Twitter), just to say: I was laid off last week from my previous employment in an abrupt downsizing — a company pivot, evidently away from the work I like to do.  I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in admin, information theory, linguistics, programming, statistics, work | Leave a comment

on moving from academics to startups

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Jeremy

An old labmate asked me for my thoughts on interviewing (she just graduated with a PhD, and wanted my perspective on interviewing at a startup). I don’t feel like I’m an expert, but I’ve been through the PhD wars and … Continue reading →

Posted in academics, programming, San Francisco | 2 Comments

Character encodings – a short tutorial

Posted on May 15, 2011 by Jeremy

There is a huge profusion of terms around sets of letters, symbols, and characters and how they are encoded onto computers. I found myself embroiled in this mess working at a speech-technology company back in the day as we struggled … Continue reading →

Posted in linguistics, programming | 2 Comments