Dragons in the Algorithm

Introduction If, like me, you regularly read programming blogs (and you do, otherwise you wouldn't be seeing these words), then you are well aware that our industry is currently deep in the throes of a drastic change and more than half of all those blog a…

I wrote previously about unreasonable contracts, particularly about the click-through confidentiality agreement from EquityZen which requires that those agree to it promise not to reveal the existence or the contents of the agreement itself.

On Wednesday (June 19) the book club met to discuss "I Have Some Questions for You" by Rebecca Makkai.

This Tuesday we have a primary election coming up here in Pennsylvania.

This Tuesday we have an election coming up here in Pennsylvania.

This Tuesday we have a primary election coming up here in Pennsylvania.

Google Sheets is a fine tool for working with spreadsheets, but it doesn't quite manage to have all of the functionality that Excel has.

Here is a question I was answering on Reddit recently: Say you have 2 algorithms and you determine both are O(log n) (or anything else that's the same).

This Tuesday we have a primary election coming up here in Pennsylvania.

SECON is Capital One's internal software conference.

I've been looking at a few financial companies lately, and I wanted to talk about some clauses I consider unreasonable that are found in the legal agreements they expect you to click through.

For some time now, I have been interested in journalism, especially journalistic ethics.

I am building a system to store records about businesses (within the US).

Question: Do you feel that daily standups add value?

Twice recently I have heard Mark Mathewson (MVP for International and Small Business Tech at Capital One, where I work) give a talk in his capacity as executive responsible for inspiring our diversity programs within Tech.

My employer now uses gmail for our company email (and it's what I use at home also) so I would like "mailto:" links to work with Gmail.

I've had a wonderful idea for a business.

Part 4 of a 4-part essay In the first 4 parts of this essay, we covered how company culture affects the solutions people choose, that Capital One excells at innovation but is poor at reuse, and that reuse is important.

Part 3 of a 4-part essay In the previous essay in this series I pointed out that Capital One is good good at innovation, but isn't particularly good at reuse... so what?

Part 2 of a 4-part essay For the past several years I have worked at Capital One, which is one of the larger financial institutions in the US.

Part 1 of a 4-part essay Company culture is an interesting thing.

Just a note for myself for the NEXT time this happens.

Image Search by License Question: So I want to make a logo for my friend's company.

Depending on Someone Else's Code We had an interesting problem arise the other day, a problem about code dependency.

An email I received from an Amazon recruiter Hi Michael, I recruit for a multitude of software development engineers for Amazon Services which is frequently mentioned by Jeff Bezos as one of our key strategic growth opportunities for the company, which gi…

REST Lambda Versioning So, we want to build a "serverless" application on AWS.

Michael Chermside's Election Guide to the May 2017 Democratic Primary As I sometimes do, now that I have finished doing my own research on the candidates and the issues, I will write down my thoughts to endorse the candidates and to share the results of my

Long-Running Calls Question: When building RESTful APIs, do you know of any standard patterns for handling long running API calls?

COBOL in a Bank Question: I hearing about COBOL being used in banks quite often but all my friends who actually working there say Java and Oracle and all related job adverts I have seen so far were Java or C++.

Lift and Shift Lessons I've been doing a lot of work lately on moving to the cloud.

Dockercon I am attending Dockercon and I thought I would try a little experiment.

I don't tend to put a lot of personal content into this blog of mine, but that's exactly what I have today.

This morning's release didn't go so well.

Cylon So, this is the second time that I have taken a look at the programming language Ceylon.

When you are writing middleware (be it SOAP services, REST APIs, or something else) an important point to realize is that *Back Ends Fail*.

Today is the deadline for providing public comment to the FCC on whether to classify broadband communications under Title II -- basically, whether or not to enforce Net Neutrality in a way that works.

In the Python discussion group, Skip Montanaro posted the title question: what's the "right" way to abandon an open source package?

A week or so ago Microsoft dug into a customer's Hotmail account in order to track down some information about code that had been stolen from Microsoft.

I have had people tell me things like "You should never throw an exception to return a value in an unusual case, exceptions are only supposed to be used for error conditions."

I don't often write book reviews here, but in this case I have a connection to the book.

CAPCHAs are those odd little boxes that show some badly malformed letters and numbers and ask you to type them in.

I wanted to pass on an excellent idea that I read from Martin Fowler's Blog.

"Satoshi Nakamoto" is the alias of the anonymous person who invented and published the protocol for Bitcoin.

So, "Sunil Kumar" of Panzer Solutions wrote to me a ten days ago offering a position.

After looking at the iPhone 5, I see people saying that phones already have everything they need... nothing new will happen.

Ben Northrop wrote to complain that story points are not accurate.

Suppose you wanted to build a tool for anonymously capturing the websites that a user visited and keeping a record of the public sites while keeping the users completely anonymous so their browsing history could not be determined.

Suppose you were building a tool integrated with web browsers to anonymously capture the (public) websites that a user visited and store them to a P2P network shared by the users of this tool.

Suppose you were building a tool for anonymously capture the (public) websites that a user visited.

Do you remember Google Web Accelerator?