Articles by Derek Jones

Converting lines in an svg image to csv

August 15, 2019 | Derek Jones

During a search for data on programming language usage I discovered Stack Overflow Trends, showing an interesting plot of language tags appearing on Stack Overflow questions (see below). Where was the csv file for these numbers? Somebody had asked this question last year, but there were no answers. The graphic ... [Read more...]

My book’s pdf generation workflow

August 11, 2019 | Derek Jones

The process used to generate the pdf of my evidence-based software engineering book has been on my list of things to blog about, for ever. An email arrived this afternoon, asking how I produced various effects using Asciidoc; this post probably contains rather more than N. Psaris wanted to know. ... [Read more...]

Cognitive capitalism chapter reworked

May 29, 2019 | Derek Jones

The Cognitive capitalism chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book took longer than expected to polish; in fact it got reworked, rather than polished (which still needs to happen, and there might be more text moving from other chapters). Changing the chapter title, from Economics to Cognitive capitalism, helped clarify ... [Read more...]

Polished human cognitive characteristics chapter

March 3, 2019 | Derek Jones

It has been just over two years since I release the first draft of the Human cognitive characteristics chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book. As new material was discovered, it got added where it seemed to belong (at the time), no effort was invested in maintaining any degree of ... [Read more...]

Practical statistics books for software engineers

November 7, 2018 | Derek Jones

So you have read my (draft) book on evidence-based software engineering and want to learn more about the statistical techniques used, but are not interested lots of detailed mathematics. What books do I suggest? All the following books are sitting on the shelf next to where I write (not that ... [Read more...]

StatsModels: the first nail in R’s coffin

August 5, 2018 | Derek Jones

In 2012, when I decided to write a book on evidence-based software engineering, R was the obvious system to use for data analysis. At the time, lots of new books had “using R” or “with R” added at the end of their titles; I chose “using R”. When developers tell me ... [Read more...]

Warp your data to make it visually appealing

May 4, 2017 | Derek Jones

Data plots can sometimes look very dull and need to be jazzed up a bit. Now, nobody’s suggesting that the important statistical properties of the data be changed, but wouldn’t it be useful if the points could be moved around a bit, to create something visually appealing without ... [Read more...]

Automatically generated join-the-dots images

December 16, 2016 | Derek Jones

It is interesting to try and figure out what picture emerges from a join-the-dots puzzle (connect-the-dots in some parts of the world). Let’s have a go at some lightweight automatic generation such a puzzle (some heavy-weight techniques). If an image is available, expressed as an boolean matrix, R’s ... [Read more...]

Producing software for money and/or recognition

October 24, 2016 | Derek Jones

In the commercial environment money makes the world go around, while in academia recognition (e.g., number of times your work is cited, being fawned over at conferences, impressive job titles) is the coin of the realm (there are a few odd balls who do it out of love for ... [Read more...]

Software engineering data sets

September 5, 2016 | Derek Jones

The pretty pictures from my empirical software engineering book are now online, along with the 210 data sets and R code (330M). Plotting the number of data sets in each year shows that empirical software engineering has really taken off in the last 10 years (code+data). Around dozen or so confidential ... [Read more...]
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