Follies

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follies•28 October 2013

Helping a stranger (and why you should understand NP-complete)

Earlier this year I helped out a random Hacker News commenter. This was covered in a recent blog post where I discussed the trade off between being an expert or a generalist. Realising my GitHub repository was littered with short, generalist introductions and experiments, I concluded that I should add the complex NP-complete constraint solver I had been working on for the past few years - an area in which I had some expertise. At least, I thought that was the conclusion. Help comes at a great cost, you must first ask for it Hacker News isn't just about start...

21 min readRead more →

follies•13 April 2013

Designing your wedding ring with 13 year old code

So often when faced with a programming task, you never truly solve the required problem from scratch. To be completely pedantic you're not writing processor instructions or even assembler but rather high level programming commands that are compiled or interpreted depending on your language choice. But with more and more tools available today to make the job easier, a lot of the necessary knowledge and skills aren't so much about how to programmatically break down and solve problems - it's just as much about knowing how to use all the tools out there. I love it when I've developed with...

12 min readRead more →

follies•27 February 2013

Idea A Day

Perhaps the one constant in becoming an expert in any particular craft is to do it regularly - preferably daily. For some disciplines e.g. skydiving and marathon running, this is prohibitive by being expensive or physically extreme. There are countless other more attainable skills, however, that demand only our time. The purpose of this blog - for me at least - is to provide a place for thoughts on software development in practice and the implementation of ideas. So often it becomes the natural place to trial a new technology but at the heart of every technology is the idea...

23 min readRead more →

follies•20 January 2013

The Difference Between Mean and Median

As a non-statistician who every now and then has to understand statistical concepts as if they were second nature, illustrative examples are like gold dust to me. I thought I'd share a small yet extreme sample set that I devised to aid me in understanding the difference between the first statistical moment, the mean, and the similar yet potentially wildly contrasting median. My problem with mathematical definitions Before I present my example, I'm going to get on my soapbox for a minute about the way some, often simple, mathematical concepts are taught. Skip to the next section if this is...

6 min readRead more →

follies•6 January 2013

From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection

What's New? MUSIC was recently launched, so for those of you who've already read about the idea, architecture and technology stack, you can go straight to the post-launch results and conclusions. For everyone else though... At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take...

25 min readRead more →

follies•8 December 2012

What's New? Music

At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take up a large part of my free time for the next 9 months. I have created the website What's New? MUSIC. Here is my journey. The tweet - which no-one replied to - that started...

19 min readRead more →