Category: Maths
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LEGO and Software – Part Reuse
This is the fourth post in a series exploring LEGO® as a Metaphor for Software Reuse. The story is evolving as I go because I keep finding interesting things in the data. I’ll tie it all up with the key things I’ve found at some point. In this post we’re looking from the part perspective…
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LEGO and Software – Lifespans
This is the third post in a series exploring LEGO as a Metaphor for Software Reuse through data (part 1 & part 2). In this post, we’ll look at reuse through the lens of LEGO® part lifespans. Not how long before the bricks wear out, are chewed by your dog, or squashed painfully underfoot in…
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LEGO and Software – Variety and Specialisation
Since my first post on LEGO as a Metaphor for Software Reuse, I have done some more homework on existing analyses of LEGO® products, to understand what I could myself reuse and what gaps I could fill with further data analysis. I’ve found three fascinating analyses that I share below. However, I should note that…
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LEGO as a Metaphor for Software Reuse – Does the Data Stack Up?
LEGO® products are often cited as a metaphor for software reuse; individual parts being composable in myriad ways. I think this is a bit simplistic and may miss the point for software, but let’s assume we should aim to make software in components that are as reusable as LEGO parts. With that assumption, what level…
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More Sankey for Less Confusion?
Confusion Matrixes are essential for evaluating classifiers, but for many who are new to them, they cause, well, confusion. Sankey Diagrams are an alternative way of representing matrix data, and I’ve found some people – who are new to matrix data, like business domain experts who are not experienced data scientists – find them easier…
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Maths Whimsy
Time to make for a home for those occasional mathematical coding curios. I’ve kicked off with an analysis, using various Numpy approaches, of the gravity field around a square (or cubic) planet, inspired by a project my children were working on. If you’ve ever wondered, this is what gravity looks like on the surface of…
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Scaling Change
Once upon a time, scaling production may have been enough to be competitive. Now, the most competitive organisations scale change to continually improve customer experience. How can we use what we’ve learned scaling production to scale change? I recently presented a talk titled “Scaling Change”. In the talk I explore the connections between scaling production, sustaining…
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Scaling Change Spoiler
When software engineers think about scaling, they think in terms of the order of complexity, or “Big-O“, of a process or system. Whereas production is O(N) and can be scaled by shifting variable costs to fixed, I contend that change is O(N2) due to the interaction of each new change with all previous changes. We could…
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Fireballs in the Sky wins iAward
Very exciting news for the Fireballs in the Sky app team from Curtin University and ThoughtWorks: the app won the iAwards education category in 2015! The AIIA iAwards are the premier awards program for innovation in the Australian digital economy. Believe me, I am excited, even though Phil gets all the speaking parts in this heavily edited interview 🙂 I…
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Seeing Stars – Bespoke AR for Mobiles
I presented on the development of the awesome Fireballs in the Sky app (iOS and Android) at YOW! West with some great app developers. See the PDF. (NB. there were a lot of transitions) Abstract We’ll explore the development of the Fireballs in the Sky app, designed for citizen scientists to record sightings of meteorites…