Ivica Loncar's List: programming and software development

• What is a software architect?

• Processing is an open source programming language and environment for   people who want to program images, animation, and interactions.

• In computer science, a kd-tree (short for k-dimensional tree) is a space-partitioning data structure for organizing points in a k-dimensional space. kd-trees are a useful data structure for several applications, such as searches involving a multidimensional search key (e.g. range searches and nearest neighbor searches).

• Geeks are no longer revered as gods amongst humanity for our ability to manipulate computers.  We get crappy jobs just like everyone else.
• Nothing is more tedious, horrific, or uninspiring to developers to work on projects that lack any real meaning in the world.  Or lack any real direction.  Or lack any substantial need from the company.
• These points all touch on the same three basic concepts:  autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

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• How do you deliver software architecture?

• Tulip is an information visualization framework dedicated to the analysis and visualization of relational data. Tulip aims to provide the developer with a complete library, supporting the design of interactive information visualization applications for relational data that can be tailored to the problems he or she is addressing.

• An Open Source MQTT v3 Broker

• The absence of documented assumptions, or even any consideration of the assumptions, pretty much makes an estimate unrepeatable and probably worthless.
• It seems to be a built-in human characteristic to prefer precision over accuracy. By this I mean that humans prefer a specific, single value that pretends to certainty (and which the estimator "knows" is probably wrong) over a range value that almost certainly includes the most probable value and hence is correct, but which retains some level of uncertainty.
• That is, project managers make estimates by referring to their past project experiences. But few can produce any historic data when challenged, and typically there is very little rigor in the approach. No assumptions are documented, no baseline measurements made, and often no provision exists for feedback.
• post-implementation reviews, and the project manager who makes personal records of the accuracy of estimates seems a rarity
• Good estimators practice on inconsequential topics, so they develop the habits of estimating. They do so all the time, on various kinds of estimate.

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• Buy Cheap Programmers and Save Money
• The critical point here is that I don’t want my programmers writing tests; that’s not what I pay them for. They’re there to write programs. The testers are there to test
• What is really important in any software development effort is that the developers have good business knowledge. This is partly because business analysts don’t have enough business knowledge to put some decent requirements together before the end of the requirements analysis phase when they disappear onto the next project.
• Who cares about the quality of code? What we all want is working software delivered on time and to budget.
• I hope that this article has convinced you that your next project is better staffed with low-cost, below average developers.

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• DiffKit is an application, and a framework, for comparing two tables of data, field-by-field. The tables can come from any of a number of sources, such as an RDBMS or CSV file, and DiffKit is able to mix different kinds of sources in the same diff operation. DiffKit is like the Unix diff utility, but for tables instead of lines of text.

• The Diff Match and Patch libraries offer robust algorithms to perform the operations required for synchronizing plain text.