On regulation in software engineering

Posted on Sun 21 July 2024 in Software • Tagged with software-engineering, politics

Emergency services, GPs, hospitals, transportation systems and the like are funded, at least in part, by public money. When their computer systems go down, the public is badly affected and people can get hurt, and lives can be put at risk. So what regulations and quality controls are there on …


Continue reading

In Praise of Visualization

Posted on Sat 11 May 2024 in Software • Tagged with simulation, physics, project-management

A little investment into building a GUI for live visualizations and control provides huge improvements in iteration speed.

I recently came across the excellent video Coding Adventure: Simulating Fluids wonderfully explained by Sebastian Lague. The video walks through the steps to build a simple smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation from nothing …


Continue reading

Communicating with the past and the future

Posted on Fri 10 May 2024 in Software • Tagged with documentation, project-management

Originally written May 2022.

Introduction

In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has unflattering things to say about the development of writing, arguing among other things that it weakens the memory:

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared …


Continue reading

Are vegans vegetarians? and related questions

Posted on Sun 28 April 2024 in Software • Tagged with logic, type theory

I recently asked the following questions:

Assuming all other requirements are the same:

  1. Is a vegan a vegetarian?
  2. Is a vegetarian a vegan?

To my (somewhat) surprise, this drew quite a lot of interest from colleagues, friends, and even people on Facebook I hadn't talked to for years, with lots …


Continue reading

Self-hosting a minimal website with nginx and HTTPS

Posted on Sat 27 April 2024 in Software • Tagged with backend, nginx, https

This website is now self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi server at home. I had struggled with nginx and HTTPS in the past, so was rather pleasantly surprised to see how straightforward it was.

I couldn't find anything on the web that walked one through the whole process, so here are …


Continue reading