Calvin and Hobbes said that there’s treasure everywhere. For a sad geek like me, there’s also computer science everywhere. Doing the washing up the old school way involves a metaphor for the computer science concept of queue, if you think of people collaborating around the draining board. Quite a lot of this is a statement … Continue reading Computer science while washing the dishes 1: The Queue
Category: Articles
Software tools
I’ve been thinking about tools recently. It started when I compared myself to my father who, like me, had an office job for pretty much all his career. Every day he took a briefcase to work, which contained (paper) documents, pens and a calculator. I have never used a briefcase, and instead take a small … Continue reading Software tools
An Introduction to building a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and Octopus
In this article I will give a high level overview of building a CI / CD pipeline using Jenkins and Octopus. There are alternative tools, and also other ways to use Jenkins and Octopus – please treat this as just some suggestions. I won’t try to answer all questions you might have about Jenkins or … Continue reading An Introduction to building a CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and Octopus
How far away from here is the most distant bit of the UK?
I like visualisations, particularly map-based ones. Done well, it’s as if they give you superpowers or a microscope or telescope – you can see something that normally is hidden from you. They help you to understand something, and in business that often means they help you to make a decision. Below is a visualisation that … Continue reading How far away from here is the most distant bit of the UK?
Emotion and software development
I vividly remember an appointment with a sonographer when my wife was pregnant. On one hand, it was a skilled professional using a combination of acoustic gel, a wand that contained a microphone and loudspeaker, a portable computer that did signal processing on what the microphone picked up, and a monitor that displayed a visual … Continue reading Emotion and software development
Security and a voice-controlled internet-connected cooker
I have seen adverts for a NEFF cooker that you can control with your voice via Alexa. This is spiffy, but I can also see potential security problems. I’m not advocating attacking Alexa or a NEFF cooker – this article is a standard-issue discussion of security problems, to help people improve security. I hope I’m … Continue reading Security and a voice-controlled internet-connected cooker
Blogging
A friend recently talked to me about blogging, and it got me navel gazing a bit. I’ve not really thought about how or why I blog, and I guess it’s a good thing to be a reflective practitioner. At the risk of being self-indulgent, this is an article about how and why I blog. As … Continue reading Blogging
Complexity: Important stuff can be messy
At this time of year, it’s common to set goals and New Year’s resolutions such as lose X kg of weight, or run Y km. If you have a goal like this, then I wish you well. It’s less common to have goals like have a better relationship with the people I love, even though … Continue reading Complexity: Important stuff can be messy
Complexity: Performance trends in code
Introduction If you hang around programmers for long enough, you might hear people use terms like complexity or Big O notation, or say that performance is of the order … such as of the order N squared. I hope that this article makes those terms a bit less confusing. The basic idea is seeing how … Continue reading Complexity: Performance trends in code
Impostor syndrome and the programmer’s brain
Introduction Impostor syndrome is where you feel that you are in a position that you don’t deserve because you’re not good enough at something, in contrast to all the people around you who all seem to be good enough, and one of these days someone will discover you to be the fraud or impostor that … Continue reading Impostor syndrome and the programmer’s brain
