Recent Feature Articles

Mar 2019

The Blanking Blank

by in Feature Articles on

Since the dawn of software development, people have endlessly been searching for a way to modularize their applications efficiently. From the “do one thing and do it well (and also everything is text)” protocols of Unix-style command line tools, through to modern microservices, the key idea has always been to have simple, easy to understand components which interface in simple, easy to understand ways. Complex things are built from piles of small, tiny things.

Matt W was working on one of those simple modules in a Big Complicated Thing. The Big Complicated Thing was an enterprise “do everything” tool, and like most enterprise tools, it was larger and more complicated than it needed to be. Also, everything talked to everything else in XML, the most enterprise of cross-component interfaces.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-02

It's The End Of The Month As We Know It

by in Feature Articles on

Calendario abril-junio 2008

If you ask an engineer whether it's safe to cross a bridge, he'll happily walk you through how safe bridges are, how the mathematics work out, how far we've come in structural safety. You'll come away from the conversation feeling confident that no bridge will ever collapse anywhere on the face of the Earth. If you ask a software engineer about banks, however, you'll likely come away terrified, with a 50/50 chance you're now convinced to put all your money in bitcoin. Banks are notorious for bad software decisions—not so much because the decisions are worse, but because most people assume banks are more careful and security-minded.

28 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-26

Exceptionally Serial

by in Feature Articles on

You may remember Kara, who recently found some "interesting" serialization code. Now, this code happens to be responsible for sending commands to pieces of machine equipment.

Low-level machine interfaces remain one of the domains where serial protocols rule. Serial communications use simple hardware and have minimal overhead, and something like RS232 has been in real-world use since the 60s. Sure, it's slow, sure it's not great with coping with noise, sure you have to jump through some hoops if you want a connection longer than 15m, but its failures are well understood.

36 comments - Last comment @ 2019-04-10

Portage and Portability

by in Feature Articles on

ST 225 20MB drive and WDC controller

Many moons ago, when PCs came housed within heavy cases of metal and plastic, Matt Q. and his colleague were assigned to evaluate a software package for an upcoming sales venture. Unfortunately, he and the colleague worked in different offices within the same metro area. As this was an age bereft of effective online collaboration tools, Matt had to travel regularly to the other office, carrying his PC with him. Each time, that meant unscrewing and unhooking the customary 473 peripheral cables from the back of the box, schlepping it through the halls and down the stairs, and catching the bus to reach the other office, where he got to do all those things again in reverse order. When poor scheduling forced the pair to work on the weekend, they hauled their work boxes between apartments as well.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-10

How It's Made

by in Feature Articles on

People like hot dogs until they see how it's made. Most people don't ask, because they don't want to know and keep eating hot dogs. In software, sometimes we have to ask. It's not just about solving problems, but because what scares some programmers is the knowledge that their car's software might be little more than the equivalent of driving duct-taped toothpicks down the highway at 70MPH. Our entire field is bad at what we do.

Brett worked as a system analyst for a medical research institution, MedStitute. MedStitute used proprietary software for data storage and analysis, called MedTech. Doctors and researchers like MedTech's results, but Brett his co-worker Tyree- know how it's made.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2021-01-16
Contact Privacy Policy RSS

Copyright © 2024 Inedo Publishing - v2023.2

Monitored by Panopta • Deployed with BuildMaster