Publications by Derek Jones
StatsModels: the first nail in R’s coffin
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 they need to do some statistical analysis, and ask whether they should...
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Practical statistics books for software engineers
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 they get read that much these days). Before I took the...
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Polished statistical analysis chapters in evidence-based software engineering
I have completed the polishing/correcting/fiddling of the eight statistical analysis related chapters of my evidence-based software engineering book, and an updated draft pdf is now available (download here). The material was in much better shape than I recalled, after abandoning it to the world 2-years ago, to work on the software engineering ch...
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Polished human cognitive characteristics chapter
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 coherence. The plan was to find enough material to...
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Cognitive capitalism chapter reworked
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 lots of decisi...
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Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems
I am someone who regularly uses R, and my interest in programming languages means that on a semi-regular basis spend time reading blog posts about the language. Over the last year, or so, I had noticed several patterns of behavior, and after reading a recent blog post things started to make sense (the blog post gets a lot of things wrong, but mo...
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My book’s pdf generation workflow
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. It’s very easy to get sucked into fiddling aroun...
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Converting lines in an svg image to csv
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 is in svg format; has anybody wri...
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Ecosystems chapter of “evidence-based software engineering” reworked
The Ecosystems chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked (I have given up on the idea that this second pass is also where the polishing happens; polishing still needs to happen, and there might be more material migration between chapters); download here. I have been reading books on biological ecosystems, and a few ...
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Projects chapter of ‘evidence-based software engineering’ reworked
The Projects chapter of my evidence-based software engineering book has been reworked; draft pdf available here. A lot of developers spend their time working on projects, and there ought to be loads of data available. But, as we all know, few companies measure anything, and fewer hang on to the data. Every now and again I actively contact compan...
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