Hi, I'm César

Dynamic programming

A handful of representative problems solved

Posted on December 21, 2020

Dynamic programming (DP) is one of the most basic and, at the same time, challenging programming paradigms. Some of the best algorithms that I know, such as the Levenshtein distance and DTW are implemented using this paradigm. It consists of simplifying a complicated problem by breaking it down into simpler...

Shortening the distance between academia and industry

An imperative need of researchers

Posted on November 2, 2020

Research is about solving relevant problems for the best of humanity. However, the relevance of certain problems is a highly subjective matter. Is it relevant to send a human being to Mars? Maybe it is, or maybe not. One thing is for sure: research is expensive. As far as I...

Empirical software engineering research is harder than you think

Trust me

Posted on October 15, 2020

You are a very talented researcher. Perhaps you come from a favored field, e.g., from the popular machine learning (ML) research community. But now, you have decided to expand your horizons and solve software engineering (SE) problems. Hence, for the next years, you will be working as an empirical SE...

The Producer-Consumer pattern in Java made easy

An example using BlockingQueue interface

Posted on June 28, 2020

I see the usage of a recurring handy pattern for doing data collection and analysis in software engineering: the producer-consumer pattern. This pattern simplifies the data acquisition (handled by the Producer), and the data post-processing (handled by the Consumer). The Producer collects the data items one at the time and...

Diversity-driven software debloat

Leveraging the wisdom of multiple coverage tools

Posted on June 8, 2020

For months, I have worked on dynamic debloat of Java artifacts with JDBL. To do so, I need to compile and execute software applications to determine what parts of the compiled application are used when executing it using some workloads. Then, with the collected usage information, I debloat the unused...

Unix cmd hacks

Boosting automation from the shell

Posted on May 23, 2020

I want to share my personal notes of the edX course Unix Tools: Data, Software and Production Engineering, by Prof. Diomidis Spinellis. I attended this course from March to June, 2020. It was my first MOOC experience. I have to say that I learned a lot in this course, and...