There's an old saying that I mistrust deeply: users don't know what they want. I think they do, and I think that products that are designed based on the unshakeable conviction that users don't know what they want routinely turn out to be terrible.
You don't see it because sometimes …
I'm getting old, and there are things that I don't notice too well anymore. But I'm pretty sure UI elements have been getting bigger. Everywhere.
That makes a lot of sense on touch devices. Fingers are big and bulky, and the widgets that press them need to be big and …
It's very hard to write an introduction to an article about BLE without sounding a little ridiculous. What are you going to say, that it's all around us today? It's been all around us for five years. It's the #1 choice for IoT applications today, owing in no small part …
Modbus is a quaint protocol. It's one of my favourite protocols -- it's not very convenient to use, but it's pretty convenient to implement and remarkably flexible for an otherwise pretty opinionated protocol. Its specs are very self-contained and easy to follow.
That being said, like all protocols that are a …
It's been nearly 20 years since Rob Pike's infamously won the "Best at saying what we're all thinking" prize with his talk about how systems software research is irrelevant. And, while systems software research is doing slightly (though not glamorously) better than in 2000, it's still mostly circling the drain …
Or a C++ Engineer. Or a C Engineer. Or a JS Engineer. If a job ad reads anything like that, it's bad. If it's representative of a company's recruitment efforts, it's very likely that you don't want to work there.
I always knew this, the way you know the cinnamon …
It's impossible to discuss Electron without the topic of space being brought up, and once that happens, you have to survive the talk about how storage is cheap today and space just doesn't matter anymore.
Here is why I think all that is bogus -- for bonus points, without any unironic …
One of the easiest ways to "settle" a technical discussion is to resort to an analogy. It took me three minutes of browsing HN (why do I keep doing that to myself?) to find the first one today. When operating systems and computers are discussed, a car analogy is sure …
I just read that the Max Planck Society discontinued its agreement with Elsevier and this sent me whirling back to a time when I was involved in research -- and that was the time when I gained even more of an appreciation for the programming community.
Back in university, I briefly …
An article about C Portability Lessons for Weird Machines has been making the headlines on the Interwebs lately. It's full of interesting examples, though none of them are from machines relevant to the last two decades of high-end computing.
I think these lessons are still relevant today, though, and that …
