My post “How Reddit Will (Maybe) Save Software Development” went through a few iterations. It started as a condemnation of crappy computer books (lack of rigor). It then transformed into an encouragement of rigor in design and coding, and went through minor revisions. I then started thinking about “internalizing the externality,” and either penalizing bad [...]
After taking an abstract algebra class, I decided to revisit something from my cryptography class and figure out how the Number Field Sieve works, since my final project was writing the quadratic sieve [side-note: if anyone wants the code for it, I'll throw it up on the site. Actual sieving was not a requirement, so [...]
Or, This Started as a Diatribe About Bad Programming Books, and Turned Into Beating a Dead Horse. Decades after The Mythical Man Month examined the management of software development, projects are still failing at an alarming rate. Some estimates say that as few as 34% of software engineering undertakings are successful. Not only that, but [...]
