Phergie refactoring idea
I’m taking a course this semester on software architecture — the high level design principles that go into building high-quality, maintainable software. The class is generally pretty decent, but the best part of it is the project. Over the course of the semester, teams have to learn and describe the architecture of an open source [...]
Getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter to work with the BeagleBone
(For the benefit of fellow “embedded systems” students…) If you’re having trouble getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter working with the BeagleBone, I found this Raspberry Pi forum post really useful. You have to change the commands slightly for the Beagle. To download the driver and install it, run the following on your Beagle: ubuntu@arm [...]
The Performance of Open Source Applications
If you’ve spoken to me in the last few weeks you’ve probably heard that I’m co-editing a book on software performance. Well, we’re finally announcing it. From the AOSA blog: We are pleased to announce that we are starting work on a third book in this series, which will be titled The Performance of Open [...]
The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2
The second volume of The Architecture of Open Source Applications was just released thanks to the hard work of Amy Brown and Greg Wilson. I had the privilege of helping copyedit a few chapters of the book. Here’s the blurb: Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings [...]
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle
Before CUSEC 2012 I didn’t know much about Bret Victor, and I wasn’t even all that interested in his talk. I knew he would be talking about user experience, but that’s all. I thought his website was pretty cool, but I didn’t look too closely at it. The night before, I started to suspect his [...]
The Maeslant Kering: BOS development
I came across this paper (found via Lambda the Ultimate) on the development of BOS, the control system for The Maeslant Kering, which is “the movable dam which has to protect Rotterdam from floodings while, at (almost) the same time, not restricting ship traffic to the port of Rotterdam”. The development team used formal methods [...]
Thoughts on the Quorum paper
Recently on the “It Will Never Work In Theory” blog Greg Wilson blogged about a paper by Andreas Stefik, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, and Kim Slattery on “An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages” (pdf). The paper compares Perl, a popular programming language, to two [...]
Check out my talk at D4D Boston 2011!
In July I went to D4D Boston 2011, a Drupal conference with a focus on design. Even so, I was given the chance to do my talk on Drupal 7′s Field API. To my surprise, I had an audience of around fifty to talk to (or it at least felt like fifty). The talk was [...]
Blog as an interview aid
February is job hunt month if you’re in co-op, and interviews are just winding down now. I was fortunate enough to get interviewed by a handful of really cool companies, and I was surprised at how smoothly the interviews went. I was nervous as hell before — and during — my first interview, but even [...]
Concordia SOEN prerequisites made easy
At Concordia, if you want to figure out the order in which you have to take your software engineering courses, you have to go to the calendar and read through a million pages of text, jumping back and forth between the lists of core courses and the descriptions of those courses, where it tells you [...]