Category: General

  • Time estimation is hard

    In my experience estimating how long a software engineering task will be is hard. I think this is often the case with software engineering tasks in a way that it isn’t for other disciplines. More design than assembly A quick internet search suggests a beginning bricklayer might lay 250 bricks per day, an intermediate 450…

  • Markdown to PowerPoint

    When you writing documentation for your project Markdown lets you concentrate on the words rather than complicated formatting. You can take the same approach with PowerPoint. There are multiple tools out there which will do this. I’ve used marp and it makes very easy to make a presentation quickly. If presentations are a big part…

  • In one glance

    I’m surprised how often I come across large functions in projects. It’s not uncommon to come across functions with hundreds of lines. I’ve searched for something, jump in to the middle of a file, and then scrolled up desperately looking for the start of the function so I can start to understand what it’s doing.…

  • 400,000,000 times faster (again)

    I realised that my previous post talks more about what you should do and less about why you should do it. I’ll try to rectify that. For me the important ideas were: I don’t think the first point is in question. The original python code for this problem may have been terrible. It’s not surprising…

  • 400,000,000 times faster

    Matt Parker is a mathematician and comedian who writes books, makes podcasts and post YouTube videos. He originally release a podcast and then a video to solve a Wordl inspired problem. I’m going to concentrate on his follow up video. You can watch the videos but I’m going to start with a summary. The Wordl…

  • Markdown to WordPress

    When you writing documentation for your project Markdown lets you concentrate on the words rather than complicated formatting. It seems that I can take the same approach when blogging. The WordPress pluging Ultimate Markdown lets me start with simple markdown and then import. As this blog talks about balance there are bound to be ups…