Before I read The Man from the Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya, I only knew about John von Neumann in two contexts: that computers use the von Neumann architecture, and that he appeared in a story about a mathematical problem I remember from many years ago. After reading it, I understand what a genius he was, and how much of science in the 20th century he influenced. He deserves to be better known than I think he is, and this is a great book to learn about him.
Posted in Learning
Tagged book, book review, history, learning, math, mathematics, science
I really like this quote from Jeff Bezos:
“Anybody who doesn’t change their mind a lot is dramatically underestimating the complexity of the world we live in.”
Lately I have been thinking about what I have changed my mind about in software development. Here are the things I came up with:
This fall I took the course Mathematical Modelling of Football from Uppsala University. It was taught by Professor David Sumpter, and I believe this is the first academic course of its kind. The main subjects covered are modelling and analysis of events (on the ball actions), movement and pitch control (tracking data), player evaluation, and match result simulations. There were also several guest lectures from (among others) William Spearman, lead data scientist at Liverpool FC, and Javier Fernández, head of sports analytics at FC Barcelona.
The tools used were Python (using Anaconda) with NumPy, Pandas and Matplotlib. The course was a lot of work, especially the assignments, but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.
For the past two months, I have been helping my son’s grade 8 class to learn to program. All students wrote Python programs and got a feel for what programming is. This post has details on how we organized the course, code examples and lessons learned.
Continue reading
Posted in Learning, Programming
Tagged learning, programming, python, school, student, teaching
For several years now, we have been running a developer book club at work. We pick a book relevant to software development, and read a chapter a week. Every other week we meet for 30 to 45 minutes and discuss what we have read. It is quite popular and useful, so I thought I would describe how we do it, and why having a book club at work is a good idea. Continue reading
Bugs are great learning opportunities. So how do we make sure we learn as much as possible from the bugs we fix? A method I have used for more than 13 years now is to write down a short description of the bug, the fix, and the lessons I learned.
Way back in 2002, I came across a blog post by Bill Wake that described this method. I have used it ever since, and I believe it has helped me become a better software developer.
Every time I fix a particularly tricky or interesting bug, I take a few minutes to write down some facts about it. Here is an example of a typical entry: Continue reading
Posted in Debugging, Learning, Programming, Testing
When I graduated from university with a degree in Computer Science, I wanted to continue and get a Ph.D. But I also wanted to work as a software developer, so I worked for five years in industry before going back to do a Ph.D. I spent one year as a Ph.D. student before deciding that I liked professional software development better. Even though this was many years ago, I think some of the lessons I learnt still apply. Continue reading
I just finished taking the course Software Security from the University of Maryland via Coursera. It was a relatively easy course (at least if you know C) that gave an overview of the following areas: buffer overflows and other memory attacks, web security (including SQL injection, CSRF and XSS), secure design, static analysis, symbolic execution, fuzzing and penetration testing. The instructor, professor Michael Hicks, was one of the more pedagogical lecturers I have listened to, and the whole course was quite enjoyable. Continue reading
What is the half-life of programmer knowledge? It is quite common with claims that the half-life is something like 5 years. In other words, half of what you know about programming will be obsolete in 5 years. A similar sentiment is: “Programming sucks, because what you knew a few years ago is useless now”.
At first, this seems plausible. After all, there is a steady stream of new programming languages and technologies coming out. However, I think it is wrong. Programming knowledge is much more long-lived than some people realize. Continue reading
I recently finished the Coursera course Algorithms: Design and Analysis, Part 2 by Professor Tim Roughgarden of Stanford. I’ve already reviewed part 1, and here are my thoughts on the second part.
The main theme of part 1 was the divide and conquer paradigm. In the second part the main themes were greedy algorithms, dynamic programming and NP-Complete problems. The lectures were excellent, with clear and easy to follow algorithm development and proofs. At six weeks, it was one week longer than part 1, and I found it quite a bit harder than part 1. Here’s more on each part. Continue reading
Posted in Learning, Programming
Tagged algorithms, coursera, learning, on-line course, review
Henrik Warne's blog 