Made of Bugs

I’ve recently started playing with scons a little for some small personal projects. It’s not perfect, but I’ve rapidly come to the conclusion that it’s a probably far better choice than make in many cases. The main exceptions would be cases where you need to integrate into legacy build systems, or if asking or expecting [...]

A common problem in software engineering is avoiding confusion and errors when dealing with multiple types of data that share the same representation. Classic examples include differentiating between measurements stored in different units, distinguishing between a string of HTML and a string of plain text (one of these needs to be encoded before it can [...]

Basically anyone who’s used Linux for any amount of time eventually comes to know and love the strace command. strace is the system-call tracer, which traces the calls that a program makes into the kernel in order to interact with the outside world. If you’re not already familiar with this incredibly versatile tool, I suggest [...]

I’m pretty sure every developer who has ever worked with a modern database-backed application, particularly a web-app, has a love/hate relationship with their ORM, or object-relational mapper. On the one hand, ORMs are vastly more pleasant to work with than code that constructs raw SQL, even, generally, from a tool that gives you an object [...]

Last time, I announced Check Plus, a declarative language for defining Check tests in C. This time, I want to talk about the tricks I used to implement a declarative minilanguage using the C preprocessor (and some GCC extensions). The Problem We want to write some toplevel declarations that look like: #define SUITE_NAME example BEGIN_SUITE(“Example [...]

Check is an excellent unit-testing framework for C code, used by a number of relatively well-known projects. It includes features such as running all tests in separate address spaces (using fork(2)), which means that the test suite can properly report segfaults or similar crashes without the test runner crashes. My main complaint about Check is [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote that software engineers should keep lab notebooks as they work, in addition to just documenting things after the fact. Today, I’m going to share the techniques that I’ve found useful to try to get in the habit of lab-notebooking my work, even though I still feel like I could [...]

Most of the projects I’ve been working on today have fairly strict code review policies. My work requires code review on most of our code, and as we bring on an army of interns for the summer, I’ve been responsible for reviewing lots of code. Additionally, about five months ago BarnOwl, the console-based IM client [...]

Recently, I’ve been working on some BarnOwl branches that move more of the core functionality of BarnOwl into perl code, instead of C (BarnOwl is written in an unholy mix of C and perl code that call each other back and forth obsessively). Moving code into perl has many advantages, but one problem is speed [...]

Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren’t, in general, taught to take notes as they [...]