Google “HBR Agile” (or “McKinsey Agile”) and you will find pages of articles — while I don’t consider either as gospel, it does mean the business world has taken serious notice of Agile in and beyond software. I suspect Agile & Scrum may be in a bubble as an answer to all development methods — either way it is worthy of a historical interlude.

The simple origin is Jeff Sutherland who invented the software version of Scrum and Harvard Researchers that coined the term 9yrs prior. However, the roots of Agile & Scrum go much further back to Japan and…

TLDR; the teaser image gives it away —no it did not work for me, but let me explain the process and analysis in more detail.

Motivation

Like most writers, I want to expand my readership and figure out how to crack the Medium code. I suppose the key is to write good articles, but as an engineer I’m always looking at shortcuts. I read suggestions to run a few FaceBook ads so I gave it a shot.

The How To Guide

Getting started was not too difficult using Facebook’s Ad tools. …

I had downtime due to a life tragedy — during which I fired up Rust. The name resonated with me and my rusty mind and body.

Installation

As with most new tools & frameworks, install was mostly easy. But like most software, nothing is easy as it should be. The two hiccups for me setting up on my trusty Windows Surface 3 laptop:

• Setting up VSCode
• Setting up the Toolchain

I love reading about the scientists and engineers who have contributed to computer science over the years. It inspires me to learn about their amazing work — some had no formal education and most had less access to research than we do now. This is not a list of the best just some of my favorites.

John von Neumann

Johnny (as his friends call him) would have undoubtedly won a Turing Award had he not passed away before the era of the award. There is a great article on Johnny published by Cantor’s Paradise that details a lot of his background.

His talents…

Boeing is just one example of a firm under fire due to software defects that at least partly caused lives to be lost. They aren’t alone — there is a history of high-impact software failures from today’s 737-MAX and 787 glitches to the Therac-25 defect decades ago that roasted patients alive at the doctor’s office. This article explores software testing and why it remains so difficult to get right.

Some real and anecdotal defects:

• The Boeing 787 has a rumored integer overflow date/time counter such that the FAA requires the system to be rebooted every 51 days to prevent total loss of control.
• If you…

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. — Jamie Zawinski

Like most programmers, I’ve been using simple regular expressions/pattern matching like “/^Foo(bar).*/” for years, but I admit when I need a complex one like a basic email checker:

/^([a-zA-Z0–9._%-]+@[a-zA-Z0–9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6})*$/

1. I often hacked my way to finding the right regex with Google’s help
2. I had a very shallow understanding of how it really works

This article explores the fundamentals of regex that solid engineers must know, but also dives into the less known details of how they are implemented…

I worked on a few of these trading floors just like the photo above. Somewhere in the maze of monitors and screaming sales & trading sits a humble programmer like myself.

The environment is quite snobbish with bigshot traders running the show (and earning all the money) — everyone else there to serve the money makers. You can have a PhD in Physics from MIT but to the trader, you aren’t much different from the telephone help or the person who dumps the trash.

I have many dozens of these stories, but here are a few:

1. The 5 pm Meeting

There was a futures…

I honestly had not heard of Firebolt until last week. I think this is probably the case with most of the tech community. Their performance claims over the data warehousing competition are something this article aims to dive into in a technical way.

What we know about the Technology

“Firebolt has spent several years innovating at the file format, indexing, and query engine levels “ — CEO Eldad Farkash

Materials on their tech is a bit sparse given their startup and stealth nature, but some highlights:

• It appears that Firebolt “is built cloud-native from the ground up in C++” (clarified by FireBolt head of product marketing…