(feed for software engineering posts)

Recent articles

1. An Ideal Platform Experience

   I've thought a while about the vision for Platform orgs. In short, my opinion is that Platform orgs should prioritize making an incredible user experience that does not require special domain expertise to use and allows Product teams to focus all their energy on the business. Unfortunately, Platform teams frequently …

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2. A real Hello World example for react

   I got frustrated following the React "Hello, World" and tutorial because of the implied magic. How does it actually work? Where does it fit into a html page? How do I run React locally?

   The "Hello, World" has a 4 line example that does not actually work: this is the …

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3. Data warehousing in the modern era

   Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) are a pair of concepts almost as old as databases. They spring from the need for enterprises to dig into huge amounts of data to identify business trends over time to anticipate future needs. They are inexorably linked concepts; BI refers to the …

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4. Arena "leak" in glibc

   I diagnose an unexpected behavior in the glibc malloc implementation manifesting as a slow memory "leak".

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5. Statically linking libstdc++

   In this post, I statically link libstdc++ into a configured library.

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6. gdb breakpoint commands and conditional breakpoints

   During my first week at my new job, I had the opportunity to teach some of my new coworkers about gdb breakpoint commands and conditional breakpoints. I had a lot of fun teaching these techniques my friends here and thought others might find the story enjoyable as well.

   Breakpoint commands …

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7. Compiling with libtool on OmniOS

   I'm having issues compiling glib2.40.0 (a libtool compiled shared library) on Omnios.

   In particular, my shared library has a static initializer that does not get executed by the libtool linked library. I've reduced this to the test case below:

   #include <stdio.h>
   
   void __attribute__((constructor)) myctor() {
       printf("in …

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8. My zsh theme

   I spent some time this week switching from bash to zsh (I really enjoy zsh - I treat it as bash with floating point arithmetic and other niceities) and making a theme for oh-my-zsh and prezto for myself. I'm not quite done, but I am pretty pleased with the results.

   It …

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9. CS Theory with Make

   In this post, I play around with some make functions and eventually provide a constructive proof that the make syntax is turing complete via reduction to μ-recursion.

   First, we have to construct numbers. I used the representation of numbers as unary strings of the character 0: ie, the number 4 …

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