John Johnson Jr. of the LA Times reports that NASA investigators narrowed down the loss of the Mars Global Surveyor to a bad command sent to the wrong address. Johnson also reports, “The review also said the spacecraft’s onboard fault protection system failed to respond to the errors.” Surely, NASA could afford to run through […]
The New York Times has posted an obituary for John Backus. All recent computer science graduates have been exposed to John Backus’ work with BNFs, making him a legend like Djiskstra. John Backus makes up the Backus in the Backus-Naur duo. I admit that I did not remember Backus as the creator of Fortran, but […]
Poor scheduling has been the bane of several projects with which I have had involvement. Ever since the one-month estimate that I gave for my first independent software development project, a shopping cart, a statement by Fred Brooks resonates continually in my mind. In The Mythical Man-Month, Brooks states, “More software projects have gone awry […]
Just know that when it comes down to the wire, it’s just garbage in and garbage out. Reducing the implementation of software to the practice of accepting data from somewhere and preparing it to be used elsewhere has certainly helped me hit the ground running and get up to speed with existing projects.
I’ve been reviewing and documenting other peoples’ code lately, and I found some vexing patterns that came up constantly. Seeing in an if-else statement that the first (or last) few lines evaluated when the conditional is true match the first (or last) few lines evaluated when the conditional is false was a little bothersome. It […]