neilernst

anildash, 13 days ago to random

Just trying to imagine if people a few hundred years ago had been here to witness, in the span of a few weeks, an eclipse, an earthquake, a supernova as bright as the North Star, and an unexpected appearance of the northern lights.

neilernst, 1 month ago to random

I have a different view than @gvwilson on academic outreach activities. I just read a practitioner website (https://tuple.app/pair-programming-guide/scientific-research-into-pair-programming) claiming there is little research on pair programming. But there are dozens of studies on it (https://www.semanticscholar.org/search?q=pair%20programming&sort=relevance), albeit (of course!) varying degrees of quality and accessibility.

It just seems a lot of practitioners cannot be bothered to “move things around in the fridge" to find out more. This seems as much about pull as push. #contraryfriday

neilernst, 2 months ago to seresearchers

New work out today with Paris Avgeriou and fellow research and industry experts on the future for technical debt management: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.06484

We recap the past 10 years of research and look ahead to what is coming. Many takeaways, but my favorite are a need for a renewed focus on human aspects of TD management, and better incorporation of continuous development in TD awareness. cc @seresearchers

simon, 6 months ago to random

I wonder what a Venn diagram would look like that compares people who complain that Python packaging is bad and people who know about and use pipx

(If you're not on board with pipx yet it's absolutely worth learning - it really does massively reduce the pain of trying out new tools written in Python: https://pypa.github.io/pipx/ )

Cmastication, 7 months ago to random

Every time I touch Power BI I walk away flabbergasted that this is an enterprise tool that actual adults use in the real world. It is absolutely unintelligible to me. The most trivial things like “group this date/time field by day before plotting” seem impossible. Googling is horrible because of the false positives and vague language. I’m going to end up coding a Voila notebook instead, I guess.

shriramk, 7 months ago to random

People who complain "CS students today don't even take X!": do you know how much CS has grown? I pulled up the @BrownCSDept course list and marked in yellow all courses that did NOT exist ~20y ago (when many grumblers graduated). YMMV, but there are way, WAY more things to learn.

About half yellow.
Fully yellow.
Fully yellow.

neilernst, 8 months ago to random

The Canadian government research funders are reviewing open access: https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/interagency-research-funding/policies-and-guidelines/open-access/presidents-canadas-federal-research-granting-agencies-announce-review-tri-agency-open-access-policy.

There is a survey https://ca1se.voxco.com/S2/?st=rp7h1VeIWJ%2FH1L0FkNCGFpRbRMuFgSxvYwSSaqhf6%2FA%3D&lang=en

Please add your comments - you can be sure the forces of Mordor - Springer/Elsevier etc - are lobbying furiously.

jbigham, 9 months ago to random

has anyone found a way to actually effectively write with chatgpt? … i … haven't. and, i really am open to it and want to use it, a lot of the writing i do really isn't interesting even though it needs to be done. what is the gap? … definitely convinced we need more HCI! :)

neilernst, 1 year ago to random

Periodic rant about reviewing: don't submit 7 papers for review to the same journal in the past year, and then decline review invitations because you are "too busy". Strongly in favour of @amyjko approach of review credits. https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/sustainable-peer-review-via-incentive-aligned-markets-a64ff726da56