(a hurdle race, where the hurdles are made out of internet browsers”)
A paper on ArXiV looking at the impact of code quality on delivery . one caveat is that the study is from a company that offers tools to look at code quality, but the takeaway is that their measures indicate that “poor” code quality on average doubles time for development in a codebase, with the maximum time to complete work in that codebase being nine times longer than maximum time in a healthy codebase. (Link)
A nice reflection on a return to in person meetings, but also some thoughts on the consequences of that. For my own part I’ve felt I’ve missed out a lot on what was happening in the industry over the last few years, but at the same time my own horizons of what is important have changed somewhat as a result of the pandemic.
It was good to be back. What happens now, I do not know. But I don’t think we can go back to the way things were before. The world has changed. Time to cast off some comfortable old clothes, and go seize the opportunity that this horrific disease has given us.
Paper Mills are a thing - In case you’ve not seen it - this is a COPE paper about paper mills, it gives a very good overview of the history of the problem. Estimating the current scale of the problem is hard, but based on interviews publishers are seeing between 2% of submissions, through to a high of 46% of submissions, being affected by the problem. Industry - wide it seems fair to say that is is over 2%, and growing. Link
10x productivity actually means doing less, not more. A. wry simple reflection on what productivity in practice looks like. It looks like more thinking, less doing, and doing the right things. - Link.
Simon Willison has been creating tools to help with data analysis. This tweet points to a new workflow for creating a DB of text extracted from PDF files hosted in an S3 bucket. It could be really useful for academics out there who have a lot of PDFs. Link
The more automated our future, the more interesting the failure states. Cruise robo taxis block streets in San Francisco for a few hours, due to default flocking behaviour. Link. The flipside of this is if you can control this, you can use it as an attack vector on a city Link.
VR is going to be important for education. The following interview on the Scholarly Kitchen looks at what Mindscape Commons are doing in this space. Link
If you are still uncertain about remote work being here to stay - read this twitter thread. . The private equity perspective alone is worth the ticket price.
Some great advice on how to make daily standup work better. I really like the point about taking ageing tickets first as they are the ones that have accrued the most information. Link