In this blog post, we will explore how to use simulated annealing to cluster a Design Structure Matrix (DSM). We will also discuss how this approach differs from the implementation developed by Ronnie Thebeau as part of his master’s thesis. What is a Design Structure Matrix (DSM)? A Design Structure Matrix (DSM) is a compact, matrix representation of a system or project. It is used to model the relationships between elements in a system, such as tasks in a project or components in a product...| Kevin Sookocheff
I was first introduced to ML through the Coursera Programming Languages course. After the initial learning curve, I was impressed by the power of the type system and the flexibility of pattern matching. I’ve been wanting to resume my education in functional programming, and am picking up OCaml for a personal project I’m working on. Diving into the OCaml ecoystem, I was drawn to Reason, a new syntax for OCaml, and BuckleScript a compiler that integrates OCaml with the JavaScript ecosystem.| sookocheff.com
Engineering, for much of the twentieth century, was mainly about artifacts and inventions. Now, it’s increasingly about complex systems. As the airplane taxis to the gate, you access the Internet and check email with your PDA, linking the communication and transportation systems. At home, you recharge your plug-in hybrid vehicle, linking transportation to the electricity grid. At work, you develop code, commit it to a repository, run test cases, deploy to production, and monitor the result.| sookocheff.com
As a software system scales it becomes sufficiently large that the number of working parts, coupled with the number of working programmers making changes on it, makes the behaviour of the system extremely difficult to reason about. This complexity is exacerbated by the transition of many organizations towards a microservice architecture, as exemplified by the so-called “death star” architecture, where each point in the circumference of the circle represents a microservice and the lines be...| sookocheff.com