Embedded Programming: Loose Coupling Best Practices (Part 1/3)

Posted on February 5, 2019

When creating Embedded Software, system complexity that grows over lifetime makes it increasingly harder to reason about certain behaviors of the program. As always in engineering, it helps to divide one big problem into several smaller problems in order to be able to eventually solve it. This is what this... [Read More]

Git: Compare feature branches to master (Part 2/2)

Posted on January 19, 2019

In the previous article we’ve seen how to ask Git for changes introduced by a particular branch. This time, instead of changes, we would like to know which commits were introduced by a branch – that is, the hashes assigned to them. [Read More]

Debugging on the Command Line

Posted on December 2, 2018

Do you use a GUI debugger? Chances are that it is backed by the GNU Debugger, gdb, somehow. Wouldn’t it be great to use that backend directly? In this article, we are going to highlight some strengths of gdb’s command-line interface over GUI frontends. [Read More]

Stand-alone TDD monitor using 'entr'

Posted on October 14, 2018

Have you ever thought of something that continuously monitors your project’s source tree and triggers a unit test build upon file changes? You want it to be independent of the editor or IDE you use? Then maybe this is for you. [Read More]

Fixing Typos while Writing -- Two Ideas

Posted on September 23, 2018

Here are some thoughts on text editing. No matter what kind of text you write – source code, articles, to-do lists, books – there’s always a chance you get a single letter wrong at one point. Depending on your touch typing skills, this might not happen very often. But when... [Read More]

C Bitshift Operator Revisited

Posted on September 9, 2018

Recently someone asked me about C’s bitwise shift operator, specifically about what it does to signed integers. To be honest, until then I haven’t even considered applying the left or right shift operator to anything else than unsigned numbers. So let’s figure out what this is about. [Read More]

Undo Feature Using Git Plumbing Commands

Posted on August 5, 2018

Have you ever thought about adding an undo feature to your application? This blog article is an attempt to approach that task by utilizing some internals of the Git version control system together with the Memento design pattern. But please, don’t take this too seriously :-). [Read More]

Hex Parser

Posted on July 15, 2018

This article is about creating a parser for HEX files, a format that is often used as an intermediate step for programming microcontrollers. Although there are – of course – implementations out there already, I would like to use this as a welcome opportunity to play around with some interesting... [Read More]

From Subversion to Git: Snapshots

Posted on June 23, 2018

What does it mean that we talk about snapshots of our Git repository, while in Subversion we think in terms of file changes? For me at least, the key to understanding Git is that every commit is, in fact, a snapshot of the entire project. Not a list of patches.... [Read More]

Bash Job Control

Posted on June 10, 2018

When working on the command line, you may sometimes find yourself in a situation where you’d like to start a new program while another long-running process (e.g. an editor) is blocking the current terminal. In the course of this article we are going to find out how to achieve quick... [Read More]

Introduction To Readline

Posted on May 12, 2018

When developing command line applications, you will most certainly want to have bash-like line-editing features. For that, an excellent choice is the GNU readline library. We will see in this article how to use its features from out own programs in order to provide a user experience similar to that... [Read More]

Non-Interactive Text Editing in Vim

Posted on April 29, 2018

The Vim text editor has its roots in the traditional line-based editors of the early days. Due to that heritage, it supports a set of impressively powerful Ex commands that act on individual lines. In this article, we will see how to create a script composed of these commands and... [Read More]

Vim Errorformat Challenge

Posted on April 15, 2018

The Vim text editor provides built-in support for parsing compiler output. It has quite a broad understanding of the concept of a compiler though: You can call just any command and let the editor parse its output. For this to work correctly, format strings need to be specified, matching the... [Read More]

Discovering Refactoring Needs

Posted on April 1, 2018

This article is about creating a plot of complexity over change rate for a given set of source code files. According to an idea I’ve seen on twitter last week, this might help us finding spots in the code that have an influence on how well a project goes. Here... [Read More]

Maintaining A Clean History In Centralized Git Workflows

Posted on March 18, 2018

Git is a powerful tool for versioning (not only) source code files. It is decentralized by design but also works perfectly for setups that rely on a central server. By using a standard pull/push workflow though, the central history can grow complex pretty fast. In this article we will look... [Read More]

Linux Shebang Insights

Posted on March 4, 2018

In Linux, you can execute an interpreted script file in exactly the same way as you would execute a compiled binary: by setting the ‘executable’ attribute and just run it. A special sequence of characters at the beginning of the script makes this possible. In this article we will explore... [Read More]

The Shell And The Whitespace

Posted on February 18, 2018

When writing conditionals in shell scripts, have you ever wondered whether that whitespace right after the opening bracket is really necessary for the expression to evaluate correctly? You might be surprised by the answer we’ll discover in the course of this short article. [Read More]