Introduction This article came out of one of those realisations that two things I already knew were linked or even the same thing, like Clark Kent and Superman or regular expressions and finite state machines. It’s not a new realisation – a minimal amount of Googling showed that the link is in the first paragraph … Continue reading K-means clustering and Voronoi maps
Programmers should play nicely with others
Introduction There is a stereotype of a certain kind of programmer. It’s of a young white able-bodied man, alone in his room, creating the future through the force of his intellect. This creation leads to widespread change and a gazillion dollars for him. While it can be amazing to create things in code, and there … Continue reading Programmers should play nicely with others
Programmers, mental models and decisions
Introduction I listen to the podcast Art of Manliness - its title is possibly misleading, as it's quite a mix of philosophy, practical skills, self improvement, lives of interesting people and so on. The episode I listened to most recently was about mental models, from Shane Parrish who is the person behind Farnam Street. I … Continue reading Programmers, mental models and decisions
Automating the deployment of SSIS packages
Introduction This post describes how I have automated the deployment of SSIS packages to different environments (test, staging, production etc.) There are definitely other ways of doing it, and some of these are possibly better - I think that this is the oldest-school way possible. I will describe our context which I hope will explain … Continue reading Automating the deployment of SSIS packages
The emotional rollercoaster of automation projects
Yes, it's another amazing piece of artwork, showing my amazing artistic skill and drawing tools. If you missed my previous effort, have a look at a previous post on statistics - although I think that the previous post's artistic style is influenced by Wait, But Why, and this one is more influenced by xkcd. I've … Continue reading The emotional rollercoaster of automation projects
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
Writing documentation can be in your own interests
Introduction Some people take the agile manifesto's ... We ... value ... working software over comprehensive documentation the wrong way. They think it means We don't value documentation This is: a) not the same as what the agile manifesto says; b) wrong, even if you act purely from self-interest. There are at least two selfish … Continue reading Writing documentation can be in your own interests
S.E. Radio podcast on latency
I'm still slowly working my way through the back catalogue of the Software Engineering Radio podcast. One episode that I particularly liked is 277: Gil Tene on Tail Latency. It has interesting and useful stuff that helps you see things clearly. For instance: How there's more than one measure of latency (mean, median, 90th centile, … Continue reading S.E. Radio podcast on latency
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
Random Tech Thoughts 