Today I discuss the implications of ethics in software development. We’ll take a look at some of my personal experience, and 2 new Netflix documentaries: The Social Dilemma, and Challenger: The Final Flight.
A look at major new developments in the coding world for C/C++ - and some brief talk on Amazon BottleRocket and Microsoft’s Hyper-V advancements.
For new and aspiring developers - in this episode I answer the #1 question asked from future coders - should I go to college? Pros and Cons of a college degree and the University system.
We return to the early 80s and 90s to discuss the rise of consumer access to Usenet and the following decline of the service and its rise to the ranks of the undead.
Today, we go back in time to the late 70’s and observe the events that led to the creation of newgroups and usenet. Especially as this podcast covers historic events, factual corrections will be attached to the original post and/or episode as required.
After repeated encouragement from friends and coworkers, I’ve decided to take a dive into the world of podcasting. We’ll see if this is something that can keep going or not - but for now, I introduce the first episode of my podcast for this site.
So, after some consideration, I’ve decided to resurrect my previous efforts at building a Linux distribution. Mostly – because I’d like to tinker with a light-weight Linux that’s easily customizable. Something that really goes “back to basics”.
My first experiments were attempting to bootstrap a Clang/Musl build variant. Ugh!
My initial environment was Ubuntu 18.04 – with a modern C++ toolchain. I thought it’d be easy to populate a chroot environment, especially without cross compiling required. The LLVM code looks generally pretty clean – big, it does a lot, but clean. The build system though? See my previous comments on build system messes. The ‘one repo’ approach assumes a rather complete environment and does not bootstrap well to a new rootfs. I thought a hacky compile from source build would be neat – but this does not seem doable.
I’ve been thinking a lot about embedded Linux and Yocto and what constitutes an “embedded” system lately. My first PC was an 8086 clone with 2 5 1/2 floppy drive and no hard drive. I had a small collection of disks I’d trade out for my projects.
I remember running Linux on an old 386 with 4mb of RAM. I browsed the web with a 486 sporting 8Mb RAM. In more recent memory, I ran a few machines with 512 - 1Gb of RAM that managed to browse the web and accomplish most of what I do on a day to day basis - editing code and writing.
After spending the past year or so developing large Python applications, I’ve returned back to the C++ fold for my day to day work. For a long time, I developed primarily in C++, enough that the compiler became my tool of choice for simple automation tasks over the more logical scripting platforms. Large applications in a scripting language? Lunacy. And now, returning back to C++ feels painful. Time to spend some time trying to figure out why. I’m hoping to perhaps uncover some improved style for my C++ implementations with this introspection.
Over the past day, I’ve seen multiple articles (three, four, five?) from different people posted on COVID. Generally, posted with an agenda of either orange-man-bad or lizard-people-left-wing-libral-conspiracy. I’m not gonna get into specifics of these debates. I try VERY hard to keep my life positive and mostly non-political. Personally, I’m trying to wear a mask out in public, keep hand sanitizer in the car, and am actively avoiding any/all social situations. Biggest risk I’m taking these days is occasional to-go food and potentially get a beard trim from my barber after the 18th - which I’m only considering because I know how fastidious he is.