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graphviz is a great tool for creating quick diagrams. While it does not have a particularly polished WYSIWYG editor such as omnigraffle, it can automatically create diagrams from its simple markup language, DOT. After reading in the DOT markup, it uses various layout algorithms to automatically arrange the diagram. The DOT language is pretty flexible…
I was recently asked if I had any advice for reading code. It’s an important skill for developers, because practice reading code leads to faster ramp-up on projects. Studying good codebases is also one of the best ways to pick up a sense for project architecture design. 1. Find Your Point of Entry First, there’s…
I just finished a project that used a Kinect’s computer vision tools to gather information about people nearby, then communicate with other hardware to adjust the environment. (Vagueness due to NDA.) The Kinect’s SDK limited me to C#, C++, or Visual Basic, but the other device only had a USB HID interface (a generic human…
I recently gave a talk at Strange Loop called Data Structures: The Code that Isn’t There. I think it went pretty well, though I started out nervous due to a last-minute battle with OSX’s display settings and a much larger audience than anticipated! They had many excellent questions, both during the talk and through the…
While testing an engineering build for an embedded project, we noticed some strange behavior: the code matched the requirements, but some magic numbers in the requirements were out of sync with the diagnostic protocol. I realized that a batch of old requirements had been added by copy-paste-modify, and someone had forgotten to update a few…
I develop embedded software, but if you look on my coffee table, you’ll see books on a wide variety of programming topics — information retrieval, garbage collectors, and so on. This would strike some people as strange. Shouldn’t I be focusing on electronics or something? Yes and no. I consider myself an “embedded specialist,” and…
Carl is the president and co-founder of Atomic Object