A great deal of academic career is getting comfortable with rejections (and understanding selection and survivorship bias). In this post, I have prepared a (possibly incomplete) list of journals, conferences, grants, and job applications for which I have been rejected. This post is inspired by prof. …

(Note: this is a long post) I was invited to give a talk at this year’s International Symposium on Reliability Engineering (ISSRE2017) doctoral symposium. It was quite a new experience since it gave me the opportunity to reflect upon my Ph.D. …

The long way ahead Surveys among millennials indicate sustainability as one of their first priority, for example, when deciding on a purchase. I believe it would be interesting to know whether this belief also holds for how millennials see the academic curricula, in particular, the software engineering one. In fact…

I have recently defended my Ph.D. Here’s a small retrospective with some facts and figures. The defense lasted 2 hours and 15 minutes I passed it with distinctions. It took me 1587 days, from enrollment in the graduate school to defense, to complete my Ph.D. My dissertation is 104 pages…

In social sciences they say that the existing differences among the participants to an experiment is as important as the difference due to the treatment. In software engineering the differences are usually the existing skills and experience, in particular software development skills. Quoting Steve Freeman, “no tool nor technique can…

I often need to know approximately how many words my paper contains (for example when asking a quote from a proofreading service). As opposed to MS Word, getting an estimate word count in LateX is not that easy. Today, I stumbled upon a command line utility bundle with the standard TeX distribuition: detex. The utility just strips TeX commands from a .tex file. So a simply way to get a word count for the paper is:

I have been ranting for sometimes now about how scientific knowledge is actually produced in SE. To be completely honest my rants are due to a bad, unexpected rejection. Yes, I am looking at you peer-review, the brittle basis we researchers trust to carry-out our endeavours. …

And also for this year, the Academic Writing Month (aka November, aka November) is over. My pledge at the beginning of the month was 10 pomodoros (the accepted measure of academic productivity) a day, 5 days a week. …

During last ESEM I have stored the conference related tweets for a small data analysis. Let’s see what the results say. Total tweets: 188 Tweets by hashtag: #esem14 (100), #esem2014(75), #eseiw2014 (17). Number of retweets: 114 Number of tweeters: 58 Top 3 tweeters: SoftEngResGrp (21), mendezfe (15), scbs (13) Top…