Posts

How much testing is enough? Or, where to draw the line when venturing down the QA rabbithole So, you’ve written some code. Maybe it’s a single line of Perl. Maybe it’s the next big social network. Either way, you now have another concern before you ship it to production: I want to make 100% sure my code works Well, I have some bad news for you: One of the implications of the Halting problem is that this is impossible (without the aid of some serious quantumn computing advances, anyway). You can dive into the theory here, but the short version is that the only way to ensure your program can handle every possible scenario is to run it against every possible scenario. In most cases that’s an infinite number. ...

2025 Update This article is based on work I did in 2018, originally appeared on my Medium page in 2020, and went on to be featured in the Voice Tech Podcast. Since then AI and language models have come a loooong way, although the same techniques largely apply. Very few people however are building language models from scratch in this way, instead opting to either build on top of a pre-trained model or simply build an elaborate wrapper around a ChatGPT prompt. The article is republished here as-is, so that others can continue to learn from it. ...