Embedded guru and author Jack Ganssle’s latest “Embedded Muse” newsletter has a lot of good commentary on open source in embedded software projects: http://www.ganssle.com/tem/tem199.htm I subscribe to very few newsletters, and Jack’s is one of them. I read every issue, it’s that good. If you work in embedded software, or software of any kind, you [...]
Tag Archives: software
Presentation Presence
Posted by svec on December 17, 2008
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A software vendor gave a sales presentation at my office today. The vendor sent two people to present – a sales guy and an engineer. The sales guy started the pitch with an overview of the software. Sounds great, says us, but we need a bunch of technical details to know if it’s worth pursuing. [...]
How to tell you’re a bad programmer
Posted by svec on December 7, 2008
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How to tell you’re a bad programmer: 1. You think you’re an awesome programmer. 2. But no one else has ever told you so. 3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???” 4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, [...]
Baby Steps
Posted by svec on July 22, 2008
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A few seemingly unrelated thoughts, and then a tie-’em-all-together thought: 1. Rands’ recent post on “Saving Seconds” really resonated with me. I forwarded it to my wife and said, “See, this is how I think!” so that she could better understand why I optimize the shortcuts on our PC, or the way I load the [...]
Using Stack Overflow
Posted by svec on June 26, 2008
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Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood are starting a new website called Stack Overflow, it’s going to be a free programming Q&A website. I’m a fan of both of those guys (I even have an autographed copy of Joel’s book!), so I signed up to be a beta user to see how it develops. I was [...]
Data is more agile than code
Posted by svec on June 16, 2008
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Peter Norvig talks about the need for a startup company to go fast – and also in the right direction – at his Startup School 2008 talk. “Sure you gotta go fast, but if you’re not getting feedback to figure out if you’re going in the right direction it doesn’t matter how fast you go.” [...]
Knuth hates XP
Posted by svec on April 25, 2008
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In this recent interview, Donald Knuth says: “Still, I hate to duck your questions even though I also hate to offend other people’s sensibilities—given that software methodology has always been akin to religion. With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, [...]
Understanding C pointers: Part 1
Posted by svec on January 1, 2008
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As I said in “Understanding C pointers: Part 0,” I’m going to try to explain how C pointers work. Let’s start with the basics. Here’s some simple C code: int x = 23; int y = x; You can think of each variable as a box which holds the value of that variable. So in [...]
Understanding C pointers: Part 0
Posted by svec on December 28, 2007
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“C/C++ Pointers are evil. Ditto direct control of memory via malloc, free, new and delete. Java, C# and other ’safe’ languages are the wave of the future, man!” Even if you shouted a hearty, “Amen, brother!” after reading those sentences, the C/C++ languages can teach you something useful. Understanding how to directly control memory with [...]
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