I love programming and problem solving and nerd culture and growing up I never felt that computer science was not the place for me. I understand now how incredibly lucky I was, but that is for another blog post. When I grew older, my gender grew into a topic. I remember that when I started grad […]
VLOOKUP considered harmful
If you have worked with spreadsheets a bit, you must have encountered lookup functions. The most common one is the VLOOKUP, which can be used to couple two tables: What not everyone knows it that you can use LOOKUPs in another way as well, to classify data. That looks as follows: By default, Excel (and […]
A modern day Pompeii: Spreadsheets at Enron
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, […]
