The Upsyde

Last time, I wrote about how to configure VS Code to debug Rust Cortex-M programs, but you know what’s better than writing documentation for how to do a thing? Automating it. I’m very happy to announce my PR to add a basic debug configuration for VS Code has been merged into the cortex-m-quickstart template. VS […]

I’ve been toying with embedded Rust off and on for some time now. I picked up one of the STM Discovery boards and it’s been an interesting novelty for me to be able to remotely debug code running on the microcontroller. I’ve never been willing to spring for the external hardware debugger required to do […]

If you’ve been struggling with this issue and just want an answer, skip to the bottom for the TL;DR. I won’t fault you for it. Docker is a great tool for deploying web services, but one of my favorite uses for it is standardizing toolchains. Instead of everyone on the team needing to setup their […]

Logging is essential to any production system, but it’s also terribly easy to make your logs so noisy they become worthless. That’s why I’m a big fan of carefully specifying the criticality level of everything I log. Not only does it allow us to easily search the logs for potential problems, it allows us to […]

I gave a workshop for the Columbus Arduino and Raspberry Pi Enthusiasts (CARPE) Tuesday night. We had a great time and I thought it would be a good idea to share the experience and my motivation creating the workshop here. The Arduino IDE isn’t what I’d call good. It’s great for someone new to programming […]

I run a bunch of Docker containers on a single CentOS 6 server with a limited amount of memory. (I only recently bumped it from 0.5 to 1 whole whopping gig!) Before I bring another container online, I like to check to see how much room I’ve got. Being the newest versions of Docker aren’t […]

I realize that my posts here have become a bit infrequent and erratic. If you’re a frequent reader, you know that I changed jobs early this year. I didn’t just change jobs though; I completely swapped stacks. Learning a dozen technologies “overnight” has taken up a lot of the time that I previously dedicated to […]

I’m very much a “The tests pass. Ship it.” kind of guy. I like to fail fast and have long believed that the best way to find places where we missed a requirement or made a mistake is to get it into the hands of real users as quickly as possible. Recently however, the users […]

Let’s talk about Code Reviews for a minute. They’re important; they spread knowledge around and catch bugs [citation needed], but they can be frustrating some times. They don’t need to be though. There are a few things we can do to keep the code review a pleasant experience.  Review the code, not the coder.  Keep […]

I’m not a big fan of integration tests. They’re often unreliable and “flaky” due to their very nature of being integration tests that rely on file systems, networks, and databases. These kinds of tests are hard to get right. At least, it’s hard to get them stable enough to be valuable and I often wonder if […]