I recently received a request from a friend to advise him on how to hire a bioinformatician. Having been through an interview process quite recently, I thought I'd put this here as a record of what I believe is a useful approach to hire at the right skill level.By …
This is a work in progress. It will undergo continual revision.There is a fundamental flaw in how we conceive software, which has drastic effects on how we work with it. As its name suggests, the name 'software' implies that software is intangible. This is not correct. I would like …
Non-lineary is everywhere. Faults in a machine are not uniformly distributed but are interdependent on one another leading to a power relation or even an exponential relation. This is the case in virtually every system. The solution to addressing these problems is to prioritise the order in which problems will …
Written on a phone. Expect typos. I’m presently reading Taiichi Ohno’s inimitable Toyota Production System: Beyond Large Scale Production, which is such a pleasant read. It’s crisp and concise with unique insights into the development of the keys ideas of TPS. It also serves as a poignant historic of …
Computer processors (CPUs) are not brains and are in no way similar to them. I hear it time and time again and I can see why it is such a pervasie non-truth. However, repetition is not an avenue to truth.There is a direct analogue between Charles Babbage's analytical engine …
User interfaces are the points of the highest variability in usage. Therefore, the most prudent approach to design is to exhaustively explore the user space and thereby present as natural and simple as possible a set of interfaces which mediate the intended use. This may even involve inventing new types …