The global disease alert map at HealthMap displays isolated and nationwide outbreaks of disease based on news reports and curated personal accounts.

“This image is a ‘balloon race’. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble.

You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supps. These is because some supps affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from … Read more

Branch By Abstraction is a development technique whereby an introduction of a destructive change is preceded by an abstraction phase. This abstraction phase involves abstracting the affected code, updating its dependent code to use the abstraction, introducing a second unit-tested implementation, updating the code again and, lastly, deprecating and destroying the old implementation. I did … Read more

I’ve sometimes used feature branches and have never had the issues Martin Fowler talks about in this article. I can see how they would arise, but I suppose I’ve either employed continuous integration techniques or just been very lucky. Fowler writes of two methods in which feature branches can be tamed — promiscuous integration and … Read more

I generally avoid the practice these decorators are trying to ease, namely type-checking on methods, but it’s useful to have around.