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development

A collection of 55 posts

Bored Of Your Daily Job?
development, motivation, history, China

Bored Of Your Daily Job?

You do the same things every single day. You write code to solve a problem in the same way, week after week, year after year. You have reached the point where you think

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Optimization Heisenbug
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 least twice and

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Be Careful With Those Resources
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 of CPU cores

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Why Tabs Are Better Than Spaces
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 you become comfortable

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Disciplined Programmers
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. Nothing prevents accessing

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Choices And Questions
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, which technology or

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
What To Log
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 functioning. Unfortunately, often

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
About Creativity: Tolkien Vs Tolstoy
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 things in common:

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Quick & Dirty Solutions Can Blow Up In Your Face
personal, working life, development

Quick & Dirty Solutions Can Blow Up In Your Face

Few years ago, I have been asked to create a component to manage a collection of items for an embedded system. The specifications were well written (actually the best I've ever received) and

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
How I Estimate
development, personal, working life

How I Estimate

How long will it take to develop a particular project? This is a question that it's never easy to answer. When you start estimating, you have a partial idea of what you have

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Is Agile Evil?
project management, agile, development

Is Agile Evil?

I’ve never applied real agile methodologies in my job, mainly because my company uses a tweaked waterfall process. However I’ve always looked with curiosity to other systems that can make me

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
The Size Of Allocated Memory
C, development, GLib

The Size Of Allocated Memory

In a comment on Google+ to my previous post The Size Of Strings, my colleague Lee Berg asked: Other than sizeof(), what is the best way to ensure a safe implementation? This is

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
The Size Of Strings
C, development, tips

The Size Of Strings

It's quite common to find pieces of C code like the following: void do_something() { const char foo[] = "This is foo"; ... func(foo, sizeof(foo)); ... } This is perfectly legal in C

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Are You Experienced Programmers?
personal, development

Are You Experienced Programmers?

Today, my nine year old daughter told me that she is able to do everything with her kick scooter. She mastered it. Even if she uses kick scooters since she was five (that

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Playing With Lua Undefined Behaviors
Lua, development

Playing With Lua Undefined Behaviors

Lua is a scripting language suitable for embedded systems. In fact, its interpreter has a small memory footprint and an high speed (there is also a JIT compiler available on some architectures). The

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
3 min read
K.I.S.S. And The Experience
personal, development

K.I.S.S. And The Experience

This post (The Evolution of a Software Engineer) to a non-experienced developer may seems just hilarious. Instead it shows the reality. It takes many years (maybe even more than ten) to understand that

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
PLC Programming
development, PLC

PLC Programming

Last week, my colleague Tania asked me if I could help her to create a single question to quickly understand if a developer has ever dealt with a PLC. I have to admit

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
The Day That Never Comes
development, working life, personal

The Day That Never Comes

The deadline is close. The customer is waiting for your fix. Your mate needs your patch before going home. No matter which of the above situations applies: the only way to accomplish your

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Code Will Tear Us Apart
development, working life, personal

Code Will Tear Us Apart

There's nothing worst than read the code of someone you consider a good programmer and find tons of anti-patterns. Of course often there are good reasons behind some choices. Such as deadlines. Jokes

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Studio Vs Live In Software Development
development, music

Studio Vs Live In Software Development

I like rock music. And I love live performances. Well, you know, studio albums provide a great sound quality and the cure of small acoustic details. But songs registered during a tour are

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Which Programming Language You Should Not Learn
development, personal

Which Programming Language You Should Not Learn

Lately, I've seen many times young developers asking which programming languages are worth learning. Obviously I've seen a lot of superficial answers, mainly because people tend to suggest things they like. Programming has

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
Eclipse: Good Editor, Bad Build System
development, personal, Eclipse, IDEs

Eclipse: Good Editor, Bad Build System

For a large C/C++ project I'm involved in, Eclipse has been chosen as default IDE. I have to say that I really like the editor. It has some functions that make me

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Narcissus Vs Getting The Things Done
development, working life

Narcissus Vs Getting The Things Done

Do you know who Narcissus is? He is a character of ancient Greek mythology, so attracted from his own beauty to forget to eat only to look to his reflection in a river.

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
1 min read
Please Optimize
development, personal

Please Optimize

Every now and then, I find quotes against optimization, just like this: The First Rule of Program Optimization. Don't do it. The Second Rule of Program Optimization. For experts only Don't do it

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
3 min read
Don't Wait For Bad Things To Happen
development, working life

Don't Wait For Bad Things To Happen

This thing has happened to me so many times that I start to think bad luck is real. The situation is the following: a product is on the market since several years and

  • Luca Sommacal
    Luca Sommacal
2 min read
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