Udayan Banerjee

Reblogged from Algorithms in Real Life: Many interesting meta-heuristics have been bio-inspired. Some of them are: Ant colony Optimization Cuckoo Search Genetic Algorithm Ant Colony Optimization This technique has been adapted from the studies carried out on the behavior of ants. ... (more)

Reblogged from Algorithms in Real Life: At school I was always confused between Algorithms and Logarithms…Anagrams were meaningful later. Then I encountered heuristics and lately meta-heuristics. I tried to differentiate algorithms, heuristics and meta-heuristics. Additional wor... (more)

Agile manifesto has explicit stated preference for shorted sprints. Shorter sprints can ensure that: “Parkinson’s Law” does not set in, that is work does not expand to fill the available time “Understanding gap” between users and developers gets ironed out quickly “Quick respons... (more)

How do you work with a remote product owner who is in a different time zone with very little overlap of normal working hours? An agile puritan would have a simple answer – Don’t. There is an underlying assumption behind this statement. The assumption is that the product owner can... (more)

How do you eat an elephant? Simple – cut it into small pieces at eat one piece at a time. BUT… …is it really that simple? When you have a large software project it is too simplistic to assume that all you need to do is to decompose the problem to individual manageable chunk wh... (more)

Way back … in 1968, Melvin Edward Conway, an early computer scientist, computer programmer, and hacker postulated that… Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Or more concisely... (more)

How do you go about writing you program? Do you think in terms of: Programming construct Database design Abstract algorithm User interaction Looking back Way we think about writing a program has undergone several phases of evolution. The evolution has a close link with increasing... (more)

The best way to do software development is to get hold of master programmers. Get them to form a self organizing team and do the development in short increments. That is agile. What happens if you cannot find sufficient number of master programmers? Get as many master programmer... (more)

Agile works! If you have any doubt about it just look at the adoption rate … look at the study results published … or just try it yourself. Offshoring also works! Again, if you have any doubt, just look at the growth of offshoring … look at the success of the success of the Indi... (more)

Have you heard the story of the person who outsourced his work for US$ 50,000, which was just one fifth of what he was earning! His complete work was done by somebody in China (not India) while he spent his workdays surfing the web, watching cat videos on YouTube and browsing Re... (more)

Agile Manifesto was (formulated? signed? declared?) in 2001 February. The manifesto was born out the software development challenges faced in the 90′s. More than a decade has passed and we live in a different world. 6 ways the world has changed 1) Pace of change has become faste... (more)

Not necessarily! “…data on its own is just numbers, and numbers can’t run a company…” “…the quest to assemble relatively unimportant information can actually distract us from the few relevant facts…” “…small data sets won’t always give you the full picture, but the most impact... (more)

Why did Instagram modify its Terms of Use policy? The new policy says: …to help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and... (more)

Do we need programming languages? You may think that the answer is no. But, if you go by the recent trend you may need to change your mind. Consider for example the following questions: Why is Google working two (GO, DART) new programming languages? Why has IBM (X10), Cray (Chape... (more)

Gartner has released two sets of predictions for 2013 – back to back: Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2013: Technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2013 Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2013 and Beyond: Economic risks, oppo... (more)

In October, 2012 Gartner predicted that: “…by Year-End 2014, three of the top five mobile handset vendors will be Chinese…” I did not really believe it! Canalys Study But, it turns out that if you go by the study released by Canalys, it has already happened! Here are the details... (more)

I like putting faces to names. Steve Lohr did the research and wrote an article about the origin of the term Big Data in The New York Times. I couldn't resist the temptation to put faces to the names. Right or wrong, all the facts are from his article. His first step in the rese... (more)

We all know that hardware prices always comes down – but have you noticed any such trend in cloud computing? So, what happens when hardware prices keep coming down and cloud service pricing remains steady? The cloud value proposition of lowering IT costs slowly disappears … right... (more)

Of late patents around mobile technologies have been in the news. Four high profile news items are (1) Oracle suing Google for Java patent violation, (2) Apple and Samsung fighting each other in different parts of the world, Microsoft, Apple, Rim and others jointly buying Nortel ... (more)

Is Big Data a buzzword with no clear definition? Wikipedia defines Big Data as... ...a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools or traditional data processing applications... 13 More Definitions of... (more)