Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Mar. 29, 2022
For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. The principle of parsimony, also known as Occam’s razor, suggests we prefer the simplest one. For example, “I can’t open the door and can’…
Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Feb. 16, 2022
A few days ago, DeepMind (acquired by Google in 2014) released AlphaCode and self-published a paper explaining how their artificial intelligence (AI) can “understand” a programming contest task written in English and then write a Python, Java or C++ program, which would work in about 30% of cases.…
Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Dec. 1, 2021
A few months ago I got an opportunity to teach a single course for 3rd-year BSc students at Innopolis University (Russia). The title was “System Software Design.” The size of the group was about 150 people and the duration was 8 weeks. I was supposed to give them sixteen lectures, two lectures per…
Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Oct. 21, 2021
Since the time of Kernighan and Ritchie we share binary code in libraries. You need to print some text with printf() in C++? You get libc library with 700+ other functions inside. You need to copy a Java stream? You get Apache Commons IO with copy() and 140+ other methods and classes. The same happ…
Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Oct. 12, 2021
It’s a well-known problem nowadays: how can we measure the performance and productivity of individual contributors who do non-routine creative work? The best examples are research and development (R&D) teams, which usually consist of software engineers, designers, scientists, architects, qualit…
Written by Yegor Bugayenko
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on Sep. 9, 2021
Here is a very simple management framework, which we have used in our teams for the last two years. We came to it experimentally, trying to merge some Agile principles, PMBOK ideas, and common sense. Our experience so far is positive, even though the proposed rules of work are not really about proj…