Month: September 2015

by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

Things I was unprepared for as a lead developer » dev-human

I’ve been a lead developer for 2 years. It has been quite a ride and there were a lot of things I was unprepared for. I’ve always been a software engineer, mostly involved with the actual code. People tell me I have a very natural way of leading, which is probably why I was asked for the job. However, I never before considered what it takes to lead an entire team of engineers. I wish I had more preparation beforehand. So to give you, the reader, a head start, these are the topics I was unprepared for, so you can hopefully be a better leader than I was. Mind you, I didn’t fail on all aspects, but most caught up with in me at one point in time.

Source: Things I was unprepared for as a lead developer » dev-human

 
by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End – Scientific American


The implications of this research extend beyond the walls of the laboratory. Political terms, job tenures, school years, golf games—all happen over a finite period of time. We’d be wise to keep an extra-vigilant eye, therefore, on lame-duck senators, students in spring semester, and golf partners on the eighteenth hole.Even further, it demonstrates another side of a natural ability to anticipate the future. A strange mood comes over us when we have the sense of an ending. We get a little friskier; we live with more abandon. (Jon Stewart, for instance, was arguably never perkier than in the last few months of filming the Daily Show.) This fact jibes with studies showing that that dopamine, a chemical in the brain associated with pleasure and risk-taking, ramps up in rats as they near the end of a maze. This sense of anticipation can help us eke the most out of transient moments, as we try to squeeze a little more from the toothpaste tube, even if it doesn’t belong to us.

Source: People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End – Scientific American

 
by Raony Guimaraes on Uncategorized

A Large Scale Study of Programming Languages and Code Quality in Github

What is the effect of programming languages on software quality?
This question has been a topic of much debate for a very long time.
In this study, we gather a very large data set from GitHub (729
projects, 80 Million SLOC, 29,000 authors, 1.5 million commits,
in 17 languages) in an attempt to shed some empirical light on
this question. This reasonably large sample size allows us to use a
mixed-methods approach, combining multiple regression modeling
with visualization and text analytics, to study the effect of language
features such as static v.s. dynamic typing, strong v.s. weak typing on
software quality. By triangulating findings from different methods,
and controlling for confounding effects such as team size, project
size, and project history, we report that language design does have a
significant, but modest effect on software quality. Most notably, it
does appear that strong typing is modestly better than weak typing,
and among functional languages, static typing is also somewhat bet-
ter than dynamic typing. We also find that functional languages are
somewhat better than procedural languages. It is worth noting that
these modest effects arising from language design are overwhelm-
ingly dominated by the process factors such as project size, team
size, and commit size. However, we hasten to caution the reader
that even these modest effects might quite possibly be due to other,
intangible process factors, e.g., the preference of certain personality
types for functional, static and strongly typed languages.

Source: NimbusSanL-Regu – lang_study.pdf