Embedded

Laurel Cummings (@justblamelaurel) teaches people how to build what is required with the material on hand. We talked with her about how to engineer survival solutions on-the-fly, often while performing disaster relief. Also: what could be made with chewing gum and paper clips.

Laurel works at Building Momentum (buildmo.com). They are currently hiring.

Laurel spoke at SuperCon 2019 about Austere Engineering.

Marian 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:

• 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.
• 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.

Transcript

While we planned to ask Andrei Chichak to podcast when he was in town for the Embedded.fm party, we spent too much time goofing off. So we are replaying Andrei's first appearance on the show where he spoke with us about MISRA-C and ethics. (Note that this is the same Andrei who writes the STM32 Embedded Wednesday posts for the Embedded.fm blog.)

Linker post: It's dangerous to go alone! Take MISRA-C

Andrei's has personal website (we failed to talk about his kite aerial photography, it is really neat though) and his company is CBF Systems.

Plum Hall C Compiler Validation

PC Lint

JPL Coding Standards for C (and the mentioned video discussing Mars Code)

ISO 26262 Automobile software standard

Cortex-R for high reliability systems (ARM's description)

National Society of Professional Engineers code of ethics and Canadian Engineering Guidelines on the Code of Ethics

Offline, Andrei recommended two books and another podcast about MISRA:

• C Traps and Pitfalls
• Safer C
• MISRA with Johan Bezem (podcast)

In this in-depth technical discussion, Dr. Ken Lunde helps Elecia understand how to internationalize her (memory constrained) device.

CJVK Information Processing, Ken’s excellent O’Reilly book on internationalization [Note: there is a 40% off print and 50% off ebook coupon in the last few minutes of the show.]

Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP)

Images of the bone ideograph that is different between Chinese and Japanese (U+9AA8) can be found on Wikipedia.

Other sources of information:

• Ken’s CJK Type Blog at Adobe
• Unicode specification, surprisingly readable though large
• An introductory tutorial Elecia found helpful

Open source type faces

• Source Sans Pro OpenType font family (for UIs)
• Source Code Pro OpenType font family (for programming environments)

Adobe’s open source projects and Ken’s contribution to those:

• Adobe Blank is a special-purpose OpenType font, making webpages wait to load fonts until they have the correct one
• AGL and AGLFN (Adobe Glyph List) maps glyph names to Unicode values
• CMap Resources are used to unidirectionally map character codes
• CSS Orientation Test are lightweight and special-purpose OpenType fonts that map all Unicode code points to glyphs that indicate their orientation based on the writing direction.
• Kenten Generic OpenType Font provides glyphs suitable for typesetting emphasis marks in Japanese.
• Mapping Resources for PDF are used to derive content from PDF files that include CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) information.

You can also reach Ken via lunde "at" adobe.com

On this quick bonus episode, Elecia and Christopher chat about their various recent projects, some of which have just been released into the wild.

Christopher’s band 12AX7 just launched their album Kickstarter, which was selected as one of Kickstarter’s "Projects We Love”. Check it out here if you are interested in finding out more or backing it. It’ll run through July 16th at 10am Pacific Time.

Elecia’s Embedded Online Conference talk on map files will be posted publicly on June 22nd, so be on the lookout for that. In the meantime, the slides and examples are available here at embedded.fm/blog/MapFiles (and on Github)

If you’d like other Embedded merchandise such as a mug (many different options), Memory Map Land mousepad (or different poster), we have a Zazzle store.

Her lightning talk about origami, Snails, Paper, and Programming: A Computational Approach to Mollusc Morphology in Origami, is already on Youtube and you can watch it now! Elecia’s origami github can be found here.

Finally if you are interested in having your cat or cats appear in 12AX7’s upcoming music video, send Dropbox/Google Drive/iCloud/whatever links to your clips, along with how you’d like to be credited, to [email protected]. Use the subject line “Cats for 12AX7”.