Author Archives: jmischel

I ran across this puzzle about 10 years ago. Although it didn’t take me long to come up with the optimum solution, I find the puzzle interesting because it just might be a good interview question for programmers at different … Continue reading →

You’re probably familiar with the Birthday Paradox, either from your introductory statistics class or from hanging around computer programmers for too long. Briefly, the math shows that the odds of any two people in a group having the same month and … Continue reading →

(Originally posted in somewhat different form on 11/21/2016.) All too often, I run across integer comparison functions that work, but have a latent bug. It’s not a bug that you’ll run into very often but when you do run into … Continue reading →

(Originally published February 1, 2013) I see questions like this fairly regularly: I’ve said before that Thread.Sleep is a red flag indicating that something is not quite right. And when a call to Sleep is in a loop, it’s a near certainty that there is a … Continue reading →

(I don’t recall if I wrote about this before. I really need to resurrect my old blog entries.) This was an interesting puzzle to work on. Some of the programmers I subsequently explained it to just got that glazed look … Continue reading →

I’ve been contributing to Stack Overflow for 14 years: pretty much ever since it started. And every year there are Computer Science students who come up with novel ways of screwing up parsing and evaluating arithmetic expressions. It’s a problem … Continue reading →

Some years back I did a lot of research on and experimentation with the binary heap data structure. During that time I noticed that publicly available implementations placed the root of the heap at array[1], even in languages where arrays … Continue reading →

Building on my previous post about finding a working solution first, before thinking of optimization issues. I have been fortunate to work on many interesting problems in my career, and I have used that approach every time: first, find something … Continue reading →

I’ve mentioned before that I contribute to answering questions on StackOverflow. Something I see all too often is a question asking for “the most efficient way” to solve a first- or second-semester homework problem. It’s clear from the content of … Continue reading →