Large Software Projects and Education

Students record a Radio Show with AudioBoo

We all know that many real life software projects are large. Some are even obscenly large. But in universities students engage in smaller projects or as individual contributors. Can and should software engineering education be made more realistic in that students work in large scale projects? In “A Software Engineering…

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The Swedish Leader Election Protocol

This is a bit off-topic but it does feel nice to be cited in SIAM as the co-inventor of a new leader election algorithm.

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The Cost of Knowledge

Much interesting research is published through Springer and other high cost publishers. Why do researchers limit the impact of their research by choosing less accessible publication channels?

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Comments

We all love to get comments on our blogs, don’t we. Especially when they are nice polite comments like “great post”, “keep it coming” and so on. The problem is that so many of these comments are just an excuse for some spammer to get a link back to their own site. That is not why I am here blogging! Today I have taken two steps to enhance the signal to noise ratio in my comments.

First of all, I have activated ComLuv. According to some review I have read it will make my site more attractive for other bloggers to comment on as it will create a link back to their own latest blog post.

Secondly, I have installed “WordPress Hashcash“. It will force the commenters computer to perform some calculations in JavaScript to make it harder for spammers to post comments. This is not a CAPTCHA solution.

So, on one hand I have added a feature which should bring more human comments to the site. On the other hand I have added a feature which should reduce the number of non-human comments to the site. I hope the combination will work as intended.

The Value of Certifications

What is the value of certifications and medals? Are they for your museum?

Should you certify yourself as a professional? Yes and no.

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The Role of Personality in Pair Programming

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Does personality matter in pair programming? According to this Norwegian study – http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TSE.2009.41 – it does not. [bibcite key=”citeulike:9782651″] So what does matter? Experience and expertise.

References

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How to Fail as an IT Purchaser

Caveat Emptor

Update 2014-11-15: This problem is still unsolved. Now contracts are being won with even -11 SEK/h bids for some categories of consultants. Yesterday Computer Sweden revealed how a consultant company had managed to win a bidding competition for providing IT consultants the Swedish social security agency (Försäkringskassan). Their idea was…

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