Update (1-15-2014): This paper is accepted at ICSE 2015 in the industrial track. Real spreadsheets needed From the day I got the idea of researching spreadsheets for my PhD dissertation, I needed access to ‘real life’ spreadsheets, those as really used within companies. I approached a number of companies and naively thought they would share a few […]
Stop blaming spreadsheets (and take a good look in the mirror)
This week, spreadsheets hit the news again, when data for a book written by economist Pikkety turned out to contain spreadsheet errors. On this, Daniele Lemire wrote a blog post warning people not to use spreadsheets for serious work. This is useless advice, let me explain why. 1) Only a fool blames their tool Heathcare.gov is built in […]
Why give great presentations at conferences when you can get away with less?
In a few months, I’ll give my previous presentation tutorial at ICSE, but in this post I want to answer the question, why? Why should I read all your stuff about giving a good conference talk, my paper is accepted anyway? I can just copy-paste the outline and graphs from my paper and prepare in 10 minutes, […]
Open letter to NWO
Background NWO is the Dutch funding agency, comparable to the NSF in the US. One of their funding categories is the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. This scheme consists of three grants for creative talented researchers, called veni, vidi and vici, for researchers 3, 5 and 10 years away from their getting their PhD. These three grants are […]
The role of Social Media Chair
Several people have asked me about some advice on how to be a social media chair at a conference, as I have filled this position at ICSE, ICSM and WCRE this year. Instead of emailing those people, I have promised them all a blog post, so here goes What is a social media chair anyway? A […]
