On being a senior SW engineer
There is a certain amount of debate around what being a senior software engineer means. The truth is that I didn’t hear about any convincing formal definition of it. At least not one based on number of years at the role, salary, or management position. My personal experience is that, more than a clear definition of when you become a senior, there is instead one clear duty that comes with the role once you get into it. And there are three supporting pillars that help succeeding at it.
Scoring using the Vector Space Model
Previously we discussed tf-idf as a way to calculate how relevant a search term is given a set of indexed documents. When having multiple terms, we used overlap score measure consisting in the sum of the tf-idf for each term in the given input. A more general and flexible way of scoring multi-term searches is using the vector space model.
Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency 101
Let us expose here a basic and beautiful Information Retrieval concept such as tf-idf. In order to do so, we will use Python to define a basic in-memory “search engine” that will allow us to add documents and search for them. The search results will contain the relevant documents together with the tf-idf value.
The dangers of wearing two hats
Scrum is an agile project development framework. It is a powerful way of thinking within software development organisations. However it has to be understood properly in order to get the most of it.