Agile and cargo cults

Thought provoking blog post from Mike Hadlow on the way Agile is often hijacked by non-technical managers with little talent.

Somehow, over the decade or so since the original agile manifesto, agile has come to mean ‘management agile’. It’s been captured by management consultants and distilled as a small set of non-technical rituals that emerged from the much larger, richer, but often deeply technical set of agile practices.

I agree with this from one of the many comments:

The most successful teams I have seen made use of “tech leads” who were engineers capable of running a project.

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ACCU Meetup: Machine Learning for Fun and Profit

I went to the ACCU London Meet-up on 20th March: Burkhard Kloss on Machine Learning for Fun and Profit.

The core message was that Machine learning is an easy technique to invoke these days, especially with 3rd party libraries on hand like Numpy, Sci-kit Learn. The speaker has used these from Python and demonstrated programs to classify the XOR problem and a data set on Iris flowers dating from Victorian times.

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Science Jokes

These science jokes popped up on Flipboard today – some really good ones:

@PopSci I was going to tell a joke about sodium, but Na.

— Ian Haygreen (@IanHaygreen) March 24, 2014

@PopSci Being absolute zero is 0K with me

— Бeн (@benmhancock) March 24, 2014

@PopSci heisenberg is pulled over. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?” asks the policeman. H: “No. But, I know where I am.”

@PopSci Higgs Boson walks into a church and says “you can’t have mass without me!”

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Restaurant Review: Baltic, Blackfriars Road, London

Baltic

 

My colleagues and I had a team dinner at Baltic, near Southwark tube station.  The menu has plenty of polish dishes – I had a selection of blinis to start and a roast goose dish to follow.  It was a really good meal and I’d recommend the venue (especially if you are a fan of Vodka – they have over 60 from which to choose!).

Four stars

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Restaurant Review: Cigalon, Chancery Lane, London

Cigalon

Cigalon is a calm, civilised place to dine amongst the hustle and bustle of London. We had a lovely evening there and will definitely go again.
Four starts

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C++ Quiz

This C++ quiz is quite fun – not all of the questions require C++ 11, but some do.

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Surge in popularity of F#

InfoWorld reports that F# is becoming ever more popular. It has risen from 69th to 12th in the Tiobe Programming Community Index.

I’ve been writing F# code for over 3 years and I get the appeal – there are some algorithms that are so much easier to implement in F# than in C++ (particularly when they can be neatly expressed with the additional data structures that F# provides, like discriminated unions).

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Book Review: 1000, Gavin Robertson

1000This book was pretty ordinary, which made me wonder how often you can accurately identify a rotten book within the first chapter? If you have a good prediction rate, you could save valuable reading time for better books. A give-away from this book was the amount of the story that was told via dialogue. Whole chapters without any narrative. And another flaw was the lack of emotional depth – much is made of a “Famous Day” that Kay and Simon spent together – so why not, you know, actually put it in the book. It needn’t even be at the start – tuck it in further down the book – but don’t leave it out completely!

Now, I think I would have given up on Free Fire too early, because that turned out to be pretty good. On the other hand, this book was poor and the only reason it escaped two stars was due to a much improved final couple of chapters.
TwoAndAHalfStars

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Apple Security Bug

Nice analysis of the Apple security bug on Slate.

Preventing bugs like these is one of the biggest challenges of software engineering, and this incident should make it pretty damn clear why. A single extra line of code compromised the security of millions and millions, and no one caught it for more than a year.

The obvious question is: why no unit tests?

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Elevator Gossip

HereIsTheCity reports that the mystery behind a Twitter account posting comments heard in elevators at Goldman Sachs has been resolved.

He said he deliberately never said in any of his tweets that he worked for the firm. “This was never about me as a person,” he said. “It wasn’t about a firm. The stories aren’t Goldman Sachs in particular. It was about the culture in general.”

Here are some example tweets from @GSElevator:

#1: I just want to be rich enough to not be motivated by money.

If someone asks you a question and you don’t know the answer, belittle them. It’s better to be an asshole than stupid.

If there’s a hot chick behind me at the ATM, I’ll always leave my receipt in the machine so she can see my balance.

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