Ignorant code monkey. He / him. I like people, code and data. Mastodon: [email protected]
Joined April 2021
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[Blog] Is this a bug, a missing feature, or neither? Trying to answer this, or at least find better questions, with the aid of cars and cheesecake.
randomtechthoughts.blog/2024…
[Blog] Changing things (tariffs in smart meters, which side of the road people drive on, software versions) can be disruptive and risky. Blue/green is an approach to reduce the disruption and risk.
randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
[Blog] Modulo arithmetic crops up in time, music, and the limited amount of storage for numbers in computers and odometers. Programmers are wise to watch out for this before it bites. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
[Blog] Just as code can be high or low quality, so can tests. One flavour of low quality is tests that don't pin the code down to have only the desired behaviour. randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
Trees can be a good way of storing information so that you can find it quickly. But if the tree gets unbalanced it heads towards being no better than a list. Fortunately there are ways to ensure that a tree remains balanced, such as 2-3-4 trees.
randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
Sometimes the things presented to programmers as requirements are actually solutions. These can lead to assumptions and hidden disagreement.
randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
The Ministry of Testing has kindly published something I wrote about reviewing requirements. I hope that testers and non-testers find it useful. ministryoftesting.com/articl…
1/ Tests failing is usually a sign that something's wrong. However, sometimes there's too much variability to get reliable information from a test on its own, and instead you have to test over sets of related tests.
2/ Individual tests failing might be OK, as long as the overall test set passes. I explain more, referring to performance testing, data science and quantum computing randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
Laptops, like mammals, have a fight, flight or freeze response. To put my laptop into flight mode, I click on the right thing at the bottom of the screen. To get freeze, I just open enough browser tabs. To get fight, I try to get it to run my code.
[Blog] Fuzzy matching - what is it and what can I do with it? Starting with randomtechthoughts.blog/2023…
Daughter: Would you like one of these vitamins?
Me: I've already had my middle aged man vitamins, thanks.
D: I wonder what would happen if someone who wasn't a middle aged man had one of those?
M: Grow luxurious ear and nose hair and start liking 6 Music, I suppose.
For your convenience:
1. youtube.com/watch?v=d4-1ASpd…
2. youtube.com/watch?v=EE6_PacC…
Hotel showers turn us all into experimental scientists, trying to determine the shower's phase space. youtube.com/watch?v=b-pLRX3L…
Add in an often poor UX:
Are the controls for hot/cold or temp/volume?
Which axis do they rotate around?
Delay -> loose link between cause and effect.