488: Two Slices of Complimentary Bread
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Adrienne Braganza Tacke spoke with us about her book Looks Good To Me: Constructive Code Reviews. It is about how to make code reviews more useful, effective, and congenial. Adrienne’s book is available now as an or a paper copy later in the year (). Check out the example t from Appendix A. Adrienne’s personal website is .
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487: Focus on Fizzing
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Chris and Elecia chat about simulated robots, portents in the sky, the futility of making plans, and grad school. A problem with mics led us to delay the show with Shimon Schoken from (co-author of Elements of ). Look for that later in the year. Elecia is playing with , a robotics physics simulator. Simpler than ROS’s Gazebo, it also can run in an online mode where you can run it on a browser, . Chris talked about processing his photos of Comet using and . Then we talked about grad school (including ). Tony sent in this insect detector: . If you want links like this or de...
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486: A Nice Rainbow Dream
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Antoine van Gelder spoke to us about making digital musical instruments, USB, and FPGAs. Antoine works for , specifically on the USB protocol analysis tool that can be used in conjunction with Python and to act as a new USB device. While bonding over was a given, Antoine also mentioned which Elecia countered with , the book that covers the NAND2Tetris material. Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better IoT products, faster. Its off-the-shelf solution is specifically designed for bandwidth-constrained devices, offering...
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485: Conversation Is a Kind of Music
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Alan Blackwell spoke with us about the lurking dangers of large language models, the magical nature of artificial intelligence, and the future of interacting with computers. Alan is the author of which you can read in its pre-book form here: Alan’s day job is as a Professor of Interdisciplinary Design in the Cambridge University department of Computer Science and Technology. See his research interests on . (Also, given as homework in the newsletter, we didn’t directly discuss Jo Walton’s '', a playful history of automated text generation, written from a perspective in the...
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484: Collecting My Unhelpful Badge
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Chris and Elecia talk to each other about setting aside memory in a linker file, printing using your debugger, looking around a new code base, pointers as optimization, choosing processors, skill trees and merit badges. Elecia’s talk and slides. STM32 Application Note includes semihosting. Memfault’s Interrupt blog has a good . Elecia and Steph’s . A far more detailed one pointed out by a listener: The most influential book Elecia has never read is . Memfault is a leading embedded device observability platform that empowers teams to build better...
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483: An Ion of the Highest Fidelity
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Rick Altherr spoke with us about high-speed control, complicated systems, and making quantum computers. If you want to know more about building quantum computers, take a listen to Rick’s MacroFab episode: . If you want to make your own quantum circuit simulator, it only takes 27 lines of Python: . What about if you actually want to know about quantum computing? Rick suggests while we look back at Embedded.fm with Kitty Yeung, talking about her Quantum Computing Comic book and Hackaday lecture series. Rick works for where they do trapped-ion quantum computing (there are different...
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482: Reference the Same Dog Object
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Professor Colleen Lewis joined us to talk teaching pointers with stuffies, explaining inheritance through tigers, and computer science pedagogy. Check out her to view her videos explaining CS concepts with physical models. These are also collected on her website: . If you are an instructor (or thinking about teaching CS), check out Colleen’s . You may also be interested in some other research: John Edwards Study on Colleen is an Assistant Professor at University Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s . You can find her papers on (including studies on teaching and learning). ...
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481: The Girl from Evel Knievel
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Chris and Elecia talk about their current adventures in conference talks, play dates, and skunks. Elecia’s talks are available on YouTube: : An introduction to hard fault handlings, stack overflows, and debugging hard bugs : An introductions to… well, embedded systems These are both advertising for the 2nd edition of Elecia’s book, . You can also find it on O’Reilly’s Learning System and probably read it with your 30 Day Trial (). Chris got a handheld game console, the Playdate (), and has been writing a game for it. There is an interesting looking . We also...
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480: Surprises Early In The Game
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Jerry Twomey spoke with us about his new O’Reilly book which covers embedded topics such as EMI, signal processing, control systems and non-ideal components. Jerry is also the principal engineer at . His from there and you can . Here is a . You can take a look at Jerry’s and Elecia’s as well as hundreds of other books about software, hardware, engineering, and origami.
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479: Make Your Voice Heard
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Carles Cufí spoke with us about Zephyr, Nordic, learning, open source development, and corporate goals. Carles had some great suggestions for learning Zephyr: Memfault Interrupt blog series Zephyr’s Zephyr’s YouTube channel (), sorted by views Macrobatics term is from There is also the for a full picture. And various Nordic tutorials (see ). Carles was an author on . The cover animal is a .
info_outlineMarian Petre spoke to us about her research on how to make software developers better at developing software.
Marian is an Emeritus Professor of the School of Computing & Communications at the Open University in the United Kingdom. She also has a Wikipedia page.
The short version of How Expert Programmers Think About Errors is on the NeverWorkInTheory.org page along with other talks about academic studies on software development topics.
The longer version is a keynote from Strange Loop 2022: "Expert Software Developers' Approach to Error".
This concept as well as many others are summarized in Software Design Decoded: 66 Ways Experts Think (Mit Press) by Marian Petre and Andre van der Hoek (MIT Press, 2016). The book’s website provides an annotated bibliography. Marian has also co-written Software Designers in Action: A Human-Centric Look at Design Work.
She is current conducting inquiries into:
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Code dreams: This research studies whether software developers dream about coding – and, if so, the nature of those dreams. Following on from work on software developers’ mental imagery and cognitive processes during programming, this project investigates developers’ experience of coding in their dreams (whatever form that takes), and whether the content of such dreams provides insight into the developers’ design and problem solving.
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Invisible work that adds value to software development: The notion of ‘invisible work’ – activity that adds value in software development but is often overlooked or undervalued by management and promotion processes – arose repeatedly in discussions at Strange Loop 2022. Developers asked for evidence they could use to fuel conversations -- and potentially promote change -- in their organisations. This research aims to capture the main categories of ‘invisible work’ identified by developers (e.g., reducing technical debt; improving efficiency; addressing security; development of tools and resources; design discussions; …), and to gather concrete examples of the value that work adds to software.