As well as stacks as mentioned in the title, this also touches on sorting and fragmentation. Yes, I’m one of those people who think that their way of loading the dishwasher is the best way. This is part 2 of a probably 2-part series of articles on how washing up shines a light on computer … Continue reading Computer science while washing the dishes 2: The Stack
Category: Introduction
Computer science while washing the dishes 1: The Queue
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
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
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
Optimisation
This post and the next are inspired by episodes of the podcast Linear Digressions. In this post I will describe general stuff – what kind of problem is suited to optimisation, and an overview of what optimisation is. In the next post I will go into some details – two related approaches to optimisation, with … Continue reading Optimisation
An introduction to Octopus Deploy
Introduction This article aims to answer two questions: What is Octopus Deploy? Why should I use it? It won't go into the details of how to configure it, all the alternatives to Octopus Deploy and so on. What is Octopus Deploy? Octopus Deploy (which I will call just Octopus from now on) is a tool … Continue reading An introduction to Octopus Deploy
Three ways to summarise data sets
Introduction This article will talk about three ways to summarise a data set. It should be gentle stuff - two you're likely to know already, and the less-well-known one isn't tricky to understand. I'm talking about them together in one article to show how stats can often mean you need a toolbox with several stats … Continue reading Three ways to summarise data sets
An introduction to Entity Framework
Introduction This is article isn’t a hands-on guide to getting started with Entity Framework (EF). Instead it aims to give you an understanding of what EF is, whether it’s for you, and if so, which of its options apply best to you. In the next article I will do the hands-on stuff, where I walk … Continue reading An introduction to Entity Framework
What makes speech and language interfaces hard to create? Part 1: Overview
This article is in a series about computers, speech and language: Why are speech or language interfaces useful? What makes speech or language interfaces hard to create? Part 1: Overview What makes speech or langauge interfaces hard to create? Part 2: Speech What makes speech or language interfaces hard to create? Part 3: Language When … Continue reading What makes speech and language interfaces hard to create? Part 1: Overview
From Excel to SSIS, Part 5: Joining streams of data
This article is part of a series: From Excel to SSIS Getting started File Save As (a kind of Hello, World! program for SSIS) Filtering rows Grouping and calculating Joining streams of data 0. Introduction This article will cover another very useful chunk of SSIS - joining streams of data together. Often the value of two bits … Continue reading From Excel to SSIS, Part 5: Joining streams of data
