Unless a result relies on a specific hardware trick, such as a proprietary accelerator or modified instruction set, it is possible to reproduce the results of one group by a different one. Unlike the physicists we don't have to build a second Hadron ...

The problem with software structure is people don't really learn it until they really need it, and your homework assignments will have to force them to look closely at how they are solving problems, not only through algorithms but through structure.

Open source forking.

Computer science is the study of what can be automated.

Since the systems have a common parent, they probably work in the same technical domain, and therefore the features and fixes that are going to be added are probably similar. KV happens to have an example case at hand: two operating systems that diverged ...

On keeping a laboratory notebook.

One of the easiest tests to determine if you are at risk is to look hard at what you do every day and see if you, yourself, could code yourself out of a job. Programming involves a lot of rote work: templating, boilerplate, and the like. If you can see a ...

While a debug log is helpful, it's not the same thing as a laboratory notebook. If more computer scientists acted like scientists, we wouldn't have to fight over whether computing is an art or a science.

Learn the language, meet the people, eat the food.

Rethinking how data and computations should be organized.

There is no money in tools.

Not only do different cultures treat different features differently, but they also treat each other differently. How people act with respect to each other is a topic that can, and does, fill volumes of books that, as nerds, we probably have never read, ...

There is no substitute for good, direct, honest training.

If you look at the software tooling landscape, you see that the majority of developers work with either open-source tools; or tools from the recently reformed home of proprietary software, Microsoft, which has figured out that its Visual Studio Code ...

Effectively exploiting emerging far-memory technology requires consideration of operating on richly connected data outside the context of the parent process. Operating-system technology in development offers help by exposing abstractions such as memory ...

Is there ever a time when learning is not of value---for its own sake?

The challenge of providing a safe communications environment in the face of such social engineering attacks isn't just the technology; it's also people. As anyone who has done serious work in computer security knows, the biggest problems are between the ...

The greater the risk, the greater the reward, and if you do succeed, it will be an achievement that you can look back on and smile wryly about. Postdocs never laugh because postdocs are post-laughter. However, there are some things to consider before ...

Hardware overkill.

A discussion with Maya Kaczorowski, Falcon Momot, George Neville-Neil, and Chris McCubbin