Redcode

We are now cached

royvanrijn — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:16:22 +0000

Yesterday we (at JPoint) invited Stefan Tilkov over for a discussion about REST and RESTful services. He knows a lot about the subject and could educate us and help with any questions.

One of the things he mentioned was: If you don’t use caching, [...]

Ludum Dare #23: Itty-bitty botty

royvanrijn — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 16:17:22 +0000

The last two days I’ve been competing in a competition called Ludum Dare.

This is a short, 48 hour, contest. In this time you have to build an entire game based on a theme given at the start of the 48 hours. It is a good exercise is planning, scaling, hacking, imagining and just having [...]

Female coders, lighten up

royvanrijn — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 14:51:53 +0000

The Real Katie

Today I stumbled upon the following blogpost:
The Real Katie – Lighten Up

Katie talks about the sexist jokes and remarks she regularly gets in the IT/programming world, and she is sick and tired of hearing “Come on, lighten up”.

The post is moving and shows how easy it [...]

Arthur Fry Day (or: Fryday)

royvanrijn — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 09:03:16 +0000

Scrumboard
Source: wikipedia.org

Our project is doing Scrum, and one of the main aspects of Scrum is having everything clearly visible. A great example is the scrumboard, a huge whiteboard filled with Post-It notes.

Post-It notes are perfect for this; small enough to be easy to handle; sticky [...]

Devoxx 2011: Talk freely available

royvanrijn — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:36:23 +0000

Moments ago this tweet caught my eye:

Devoxx 2011: "What Shazam doesn't want you to know!" by @royvanrijn is now freely available @ http://parleys.com/d/2869

That means everybody can now watch my talk without any subscription! If you want to learn how algorithms like [...]

Levenshtein Distance Challenge: Causes

royvanrijn — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:54:54 +0000

Today I’ve been playing around with the Levenshtein distance. The Levenshtein distance is a number which measures the ‘distance’ between two strings. For example, the distance between “test” and “rest” is one.

The challenge

A Levenshtein distance of one is the key element in a challenge I’ve been reading about. I first encountered it [...]

Orchard Planting: Greatest Common Divisor

royvanrijn — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 12:21:59 +0000

The Orchard Planting contest from infinite search space is over. So it is time for a quick write-up.

The rules are simple, on a grid of integers, place N points on the grid to get as much 4 points on a line and never more then 4 points on a line.

My big break-through [...]

Parleys: Devoxx talk published

royvanrijn — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:50:50 +0000

The guys at Devoxx/Parleys have already processed all the talks and post-processed them. So my talk it now available at Parleys.com.
There is one drawback though, the talk is currently for subscribers only. If you don’t have one you can only watch the first two (very nervous) minutes.

If you’ve attended Devoxx you will [...]

Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert

royvanrijn — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:02:03 +0000

Most internet videos are a waste of time, but this one isn’t! This is an interview of Stephen Colbert (out of his normal character) with Neil DeGrasse Tyson (Hayden Planetarium director, TV science host).

The project manager and his pregnant wife

royvanrijn — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 23:21:15 +0000

Adding resources

Today I’ve (again) seen this quote on Twitter:

“A project manager is someone who thinks that 9 pregnant women can create a baby in 1 month”

This obviously isn’t the case. The story demonstrates that adding more people to a team won’t (necessarily) make the team more effective. Because some processes can’t be [...]