Collaborate Disseminate
Date and time handling is hard, that’s an ugly truth about software development we’ll all learn the hard way one day. Sure, it might seem like some trivial everyday thing that you can easily implement yourself without relying on a third-party library. I mean, it’s basically just adding seconds on …read more
Continue reading Samsung’s Leap Month Bug Teaches Not to Skimp On Testing
Is history doomed to repeat itself? Or rather, is there really any doubt that it isn’t, considering recent events that made the news? I am of course talking about New Jersey’s call for COBOL programmers to fix their ancient unemployment system, collapsing under the application spikes caused by the COVID-19 …read more
Continue reading COBOL Isn’t The Issue: A Misinterpreted Crisis
Code documentation — is there anything more exciting than spending your time writing extensive comments? If I had to guess, your answer is probably somewhere along the lines of “uhm, yes, everything is more exciting than that”. Plus, requesting to document your code is almost like an insult to your …read more
Continue reading “Good Code Documents Itself” And Other Hilarious Jokes You Shouldn’t Tell Yourself
Let’s be honest, no one likes to see their program crash. It’s a clear sign that something is wrong with our code, and that’s a truth we don’t like to see. We try our best to avoid such a situation, and we’ve seen how compiler warnings and other static code analysis tools can help us to detect and prevent possible flaws in our code, which could otherwise lead to its demise. But what if I told you that crashing your program is actually a great way to improve its overall quality? Now, this obviously sounds a bit counterintuitive, after all …read more
Continue reading Crash your code – Lessons Learned From Debugging Things That Should Never Happen™
A little while back, we were talking about utilizing compiler warnings as first step to make our C code less error-prone and increase its general stability and quality. We know now that the C compiler itself can help us here, but we also saw that there’s a limit to it. While it warns us about the most obvious mistakes and suspicious code constructs, it will leave us hanging when things get a bit more complex.
But once again, that doesn’t mean compiler warnings are useless, we simply need to see them for what they are: a first step. So today …read more
Continue reading Warnings On Steroids – Static Code Analysis Tools
If there’s one thing C is known and (in)famous for, it’s the ease of shooting yourself in the foot with it. And there’s indeed no denying that the freedom C offers comes with the price of making it our own responsibility to tame and keep the language under control. On the bright side, since the language’s flaws are so well known, we have a wide selection of tools available that help us to eliminate the most common problems and blunders that could come back to bite us further down the road. The catch is, we have to really want it …read more
Continue reading Warnings Are Your Friend – A Code Quality Primer
Today, we release rsyslog 8.31. This is probably one of the biggest releases in the past couple of years. While it also offers great new functionality, what really important about it is the focus on further improved software quality.
Let’s get a bit do… Continue reading rsyslog 8.31 – an important release
This is how you can automate Coverity Scan using Travis CI – especially if you have a complex build matrix:
create an additional matrix entry you will exclusively use for submission to Coverity
make sure you use your regular git master branch for the … Continue reading Automating Coverity Scan with a complex TravisCI build matrix
I’ve had this blog post in one form or another of draft for several years now. I hesitated to complete it, in part because at the best of times cultural observations can easily be misinterpreted and also in part because of the role I had in working with many outsourcing
Continue reading Offshoring roulette: lessons from outsourcing to India, China and the Philippines