C, working life, compilers Making integers from pointers on 64 bit Few days ago, my colleague Paolo came to me with an interesting problem he was not able to solve. He had the same code in production and and in a
self improvement, team management On Measuring Properly Setting goals is easy. Measuring the progress is hard.
Git, tips, working life Shift Gear with Git A command, an option and a hack, not necessarily in this order, can help you to manage complex repositories.
development, motivation, history, China Bored Of Your Daily Job? Introducing few variations in your daily workflow might be the key to make your job less boring
security, passwords Evolution Of Password Management - Passphrases As we have seen in the previous post [https://while2.ghost.io/evolution-of-password-management-2-or-3-factors/], using three authentication factors is quite safe. Unfortunately online services can't afford these technologies. Passphrases
development, working life, bugs Optimization Heisenbug Have you ever seen a bug that disappears when you try to debug it? This situation has a name: heisenbug[1]. A special type of heisenbug happened to me at
personal, development, embedded Be Careful With Those Resources Once, a friend of mine working for a big tech company told me: "I cannot give you the exact numbers but I usually work on a system with thousands
security, privacy, Microsoft, Intel, compilers Trust No One, Especially Microsoft And Intel As a developer, I should have full control over the programs I write. There may be a compiler between the text and the executable, but the result is exactly what
personal, security, advertising Do You Feel Guilty For Using Ad Blockers? You Shouldn't They compare you to a pirate (the article is not available anymore but the title is self explicative "Piracy and ad-blockers are both theft "). They say you are
personal, working life Natural Born Yes Men Fortunately I had to deal only with few of them (until now) but, it's always been an painful experience. Especially for a natural born No Man like me.
solved, working life, bugs [Solved] The Strangest Bug I've Ever Seen I've spent two hours to find it and two seconds for the fix. There was this gigantic piece of C code to create a report by putting together
personal, working life Who's To Blame? Once, during the development of a big project, I asked the Product Manager to tell me about the relationship between two functions (let's call them A and B)
solved, Linux, working life [Solved] Broken Packages In Ubuntu One of the worst things about working for a big company distributed world-wide is that you don't have a direct contact with the leaders of the IT department.
development, personal Why Tabs Are Better Than Spaces I think there is no doubt that readability is in the eye of the beholder. If you are customized with a certain code style, it will take some time before
working life, Perl, Linux Never Break Backward Compatibility (Again) Here we are again. It seems that, every time I upgrade Xubuntu, I cannot compile old Linux kernels anymore. Last time, it was GNU Make that broke the build [https:
working life, personal Understandable Code Last week I had a chat with my colleague Suzi. She wanted me to review a small change she made on a software almost entirely written by me. At some
working life, personal Multiball Pinball Have you ever played pinball? If yes, you may have run into the situation where you have to deal with two or even three balls on the field at the
development Disciplined Programmers Compared to C++, Python object oriented support lacks of the modifiers private and protected. Even if you can prefix an internal member with a double underscore, this is merely cosmetic
personal, working life The 3 Best Things That Happened To Me As A Programmer I started to develop professional software more than twenty years ago, during the summertime vacations. I used to work in this small software house where there were really experienced programmers.
versioning, tips Binary Files And VCS I've already written about why you should not add binary files to your code repository [https://while2.ghost.io/never-ever-add-binary-files-to-your-vcs/] but, there are some cases where it seems
development, choices Choices And Questions This is something we rarely think about, but, as programmers, every day we have to make several choices. Every step of our job involves a (conscious) choice. Which programming language,
development, working life, logging What To Log Ideally a log file should contain the exact amount of information you need to understand whether the system/application is running correctly or to find the causes of a bad
books, creativity, development About Creativity: Tolkien Vs Tolstoy They are great writers. They are known worldwide. They are the authors of two of my favorite books: Lord of the Rings and War and Peace. Those books have many
Apple, security, FBI FBI Vs Apple: The End? Eventually the F.B.I. dropped its request to force Apple to create a special version of iOS to unlock the San Bernardino killer's iPhone. Since the beginning,
security, passwords Evolution Of Password Management - 2 (Or 3) Factors Nowadays many online services use additional factors to get rid of the lack of security that password represent (no pun intended). These are all the three factors: 1. something you
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