Theory and Craft: Recent Episodes

David Crawford and Chris Yang

Applying the theory of computer science to the craft of software engineering.

Each episode we focus on one idea from computer science and try to understand how it fits into our world as professional programmers. Think of it as book club for coders.

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Each episode we focus on one idea from computer science and try to understand how it fits into our world as professional programmers.

This episode we welcome our guest host, Sergey Astretsov, to discuss the paper "Coverage and Its Discontents" about the use of code coverage as a proxy for test effectiveness. From there we debate when and why to test, discuss the relationship between commenting and testing, and generally digress.

Links:

  • Coverage and Its Discontents
  • jsfunfuzz
  • Software standard for airborne systems
  • Fast Square Root explanation

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In our second episode we interview Adam Gibson, creator of the DeepLearning4J open source project. It turns out that deep learning really is a major breakthrough for machine learning, both conceptually, and as evidenced by the benchmarks.

Links!

  • Skymind (Adam's company)
  • Andrew Ng on Deep Learning
  • Adam's Slideshare

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Each episode we’ll focus on one idea from computer science and try to understand how it fits into our world as professional programmers.

In this episode we discuss functional reactive programming as represented by the Elm language, and how it’s influencing web development through the recent popularity of ReactJS

Links:

  • Asynchronous Functional Reactive Programming for GUIs (The Elm paper)
  • Interview with ReactJS contributor Pete Hunt on Giant Robots podcast
  • Immediate Mode GUIs (Article from Game Development Magazine)