Five years later, the Ariane 5 story is still my favorite software bug

I first learned about the Ariane 5 explosion, partly caused by reusing Ariane 4 code, around five years ago at a one day taste of YoW! 2012 in Sydney, where I was also introduced to Don Reinertsen’s Keynote on the Practical Science of Batch Size (unfortunately it looks like the Melbourne copy of that video is …

As a customer, why I’m quitting Uber

I used to use Uber about twice a year, at other times I’m a huge public transportation fan. The change to require tipping to get a 5 star rating (because people respond to incentives) is a complete surprise to me. In essence, Uber didn’t learn anything about setting (and appropriately notifying the public about changing) …

Helping start something – Australian Affordable Housing Party

Disclaimer: These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent the views of the Australian Affordable Housing Party, Dick Smith’s Fair Go, the Australian Labour Party, the Liberal Party (of the Menzies era), or any other individual or organisation.   For years I’ve been concerned about rising housing unaffordability in Australia. Rational Radical’s graph …

Yep, learning the hard way

Woohoo! Lesson:  Hi <name>,  How’s your day been? 25 odd characters of awesomeness, thanks <name>. Got to tone down these intricate 30-second thoughts, TMI, and come back to Earth. Fascinating how the academic world of course tends to push so hard in the other direction towards theses of hundreds of pages, but that doesn’t excuse …

Can you upgrade to Python 3?

Basically it comes down to whether your dependencies are up to date and if they aren’t, if you want to help and contribute back to the community to move them along. The easiest is to drop your requirements.txt file into: https://caniusepython3.com/   Both of the following are also excellent tools to get an overview of …

Python 3 in Production at Mathspace

And Python 3 only in development. A huge thank you to everyone on the Mathspace Team who supported, reviewed and helped out with this endeavour. One day the Mathspace Team will put up a dedicated engineering blog, but until then this can live here. For those who haven’t heard me talk about bringing step-by-step working …