- 16 Interviewing Tips for User Studies — these apply to many situations beyond user interviews, too.
- The Backlash Against Big Data contd. (Mike Loukides) — Learn to be a data skeptic. That doesn’t mean becoming skeptical about the value of data; it means asking the hard questions that anyone claiming to be a data scientist should ask. Think carefully about the questions you’re asking, the data you have to work with, and the results that you’re getting. And learn that data is about enabling intelligent discussions, not about turning a crank and having the right answer pop out.
- The Science of Science Writing (American Scientist) — also applicable beyond the specific field for which it was written.
- earhorn — Earhorn instruments your JavaScript and shows you a detailed, reversible, line-by-line log of JavaScript execution, sort of like console.log’s crazy uncle.
ENTRIES TAGGED "open source"
Four short links: 18 April 2014
Interview Tips, Data of Any Size, Science Writing, and Instrumented Javascript
Four short links: 16 April 2014
Time Series, CT Scanner, Reading List, and Origami Microscope
- morris.js — pretty time-series line graphs.
- Open Source CT Scanner — all the awesome.
- Alan Kay’s Reading List — in case you’re wondering what to add to the pile beside your bed. (via Alex Dong)
- Foldscope — origami optical microscope, 2000x magnification for under $1.
Four short links: 14 April 2014
dategrep, Agile Signoff, Feedback Speed, and Modern Dev
- dategrep — print lines matching ranges of dates. Genius!
- Business Case Guidance in Agile Projects (gov.uk) — how the UK govt signs off on Agile projects, which normally governments have no clue over how to handle properly.
- Hyper Growth Done Right — “While I was at Oracle, it took a month before a new engineer would get any code in,” Agarwal says. “It sent this implicit message that it’s okay to take a month to write some code.” First time I’d heard this wise point articulated: slow feedback loops send the message that progress can be slow.
- Docker + Github + Jenkins — clever integration of the three tools to get repeatable continuous integration. The modern dev environment has workflow built on git, VMs, and glue.
Full-stack developers
Developers who understand the whole stack are going to build better applications.
Since Facebook’s Carlos Bueno wrote the canonical article about the full stack, there has been no shortage of posts trying to define it. For a time, Facebook allegedly only hired “full-stack developers.” That probably wasn’t quite true, even if they thought it was. And some posts really push “full-stack” developer into Unicorn territory: Laurence Gellert writes that it…
Four short links: 9 April 2014
Internet of Listeners, Mobile Deep Belief, Crowdsourced Spectrum Data, and Quantum Minecraft
- Jasper Project — an open source platform for developing always-on, voice-controlled applications. Shouting is the new swiping—I eagerly await Gartner touting the Internet-of-things-that-misunderstand-you.
- DeepBeliefSDK — deep neural network library for iOS. (via Pete Warden)
- Microsoft Spectrum Observatory — crowdsourcing spectrum utilisation information. Just open sourced their code.
- qcraft — beginner’s guide to quantum physics in Minecraft. (via Nelson Minar)
Four short links: 8 April 2014
Our Robot Future, Embeddable Pi, Behavioural Economics Not Solved Problem, and Imagine Processing Language
- Next Five Years for Robots — plausible summary of the near future progression, taken from Helen Greiner’s DEMOlabs talk.
- Raspberry Pi Compute Module — a Raspberry Pi shrunk down to fit on a SODIMM with onboard memory, whose connectors you can customise for your own needs. (via Makezine)
- Behavioural Economics and Public Policy (Financial Times) — interesting how A/B trials revealed that implementations of Cialdini’s social proof didn’t test as well as non-social-proof persuasive techniques. More useful than something that claims to be the right answer is knowing when you’re closer to the right answer. (via Mind Hacks)
- Halide Language — open source programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.
Four short links: 4 April 2014
MSFT Opening, Declarative Web, Internet Utility, and Design Fiction Reading List
- C# Compiler Open Sourced — bit by the bit, the ship of Microsoft turns.
- The Web’s Declarative Composable Future — this. For the first time since 1993, I feel like the web platform is taking a step towards being a real platform (vs simply bolting features on the side).
- Why the Government Should Provide Internet Access — video interview with Susan Crawford about why the Internet should be treated like a utility. She’s the only policy person I see talking sense. There’s a multilarity coming, when a critical mass of everyday objects are connected to each other via the Internet and offline devices become as useful as an ox-drawn cart on railway tracks. At that point it’s too late to argue you need affordable predator-proof Internet, because you’re already over the (sensing, e-ink covered, Arduino-powered) barrel. (via BoingBoing)
- Design Fiction: A Bibliography — Some resources about design fiction I’m use to share with students.
Four short links: 2 April 2014
Fault-Tolerant Resilient Yadda Yadda, Tour Tips, Punch Cards, and Public Credit
- Resilient Distributed Datasets: A Fault-Tolerant Abstraction for In-Memory Cluster Computing (PDF) — Berkeley research paper behind Apache Spark. (via Nelson Minar)
- Angular Tour — trivially add tour tips (“This is the widget basket, drag and drop for widget goodness!” type of thing) to your Angular app.
- Punchcard — generate Github-style punch card charts “with ease”.
- Where Credit Belongs for Hack (Bryan O’Sullivan) — public credit for individual contributors in a piece of corporate open source is a sign of confidence in your team, that building their public reputation isn’t going to result in them leaving for one of the many job offers they’ll receive. And, of course, of caring for your individual contributors. Kudos Facebook.
Four short links: 27 March 2014
Understanding Image Processing, Sharing Data, Fixing Bad Science, and Delightful Dashboard
- 2D Image Post-Processing Techniques and Algorithms (DIY Drones) — understanding how automated image matching and processing tools work means you can also get a better understanding how to shoot your images and what to prevent to get good matches.
- Scientists Need to Learn to Share — despite science’s reputation for rigor, sloppiness is a substantial problem in some fields. You’re much more likely to check your work and follow best data-handling practices when you know someone is going to run your code and parse your data.
- METRICS — Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford. John Ioannidis has a posse: connecting researchers into weak science, running conferences, creating a “journal watch”, and engaging policy makers. (says The Economist)
- Grafana — elegant dashboard for graphite (the realtime data graphing engine).
Pursuing adoption of free and open source software in governments
LibrePlanet explores hopes and hurdles.
Free and open source software creates a natural — and even necessary — fit with government. I joined a panel this past weekend at the Free Software Foundation conference LibrePlanet on this topic and have covered it previously in a journal article and talk. Our panel focused on barriers to its adoption and steps that…
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