Data-driven bug finding
I can’t remember the last time I went a whole day without running into a software bug. For weeks, I couldn’t invite anyone to Facebook events...
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Editing binaries
Editing binaries is a trick that comes in handy a few times a year. You don’t often need to, but when you do, there’s no alternative....
Read moreThat bogus gender gap article
Last week, Quartz published an article titled “There is no gender gap in tech salaries”. That resulted in linkbait copycat posts all over the internet, from...
Read moreThat time Oracle tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking their database
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework. Some of their results included (lower is...
Read moreWhy don’t schools teach debugging?
In the fall of 2000, I took my first engineering class: ECE 352, an entry-level digital design class for first-year computer engineers. It was standing room...
Read moreDo programmers need math?
Dear David, I’m afraid my off the cuff response the other day wasn’t too well thought out; when you talked about taking calc III and linear...
Read moreData alignment and caches
Here’s the graph of a toy benchmark1 of page-aligned vs. mis-aligned accesses; it shows a ratio of performance between the two at different working set sizes....
Read morePCA is not a panacea
Earlier this year, I interviewed with a well-known tech startup, one of the hundreds of companies that claims to have harder interviews, more challenging work, and...
Read moreWhy hardware development is hard
In CPU design, most successful teams have a fairly long lineage and rely heavily on experienced engineers. When we look at CPU startups, teams that have...
Read moreHow to discourage open source contributions
What’s the first thing you do when you find a bug or see a missing feature in an open source project? Check out the project page...
Read moreRandomize HN
You ever notice that there’s this funny threshold for getting to the front page on sites like HN? The exact threshold varies depending on how much...
Read moreWriting safe Verilog
Troll? That’s how people write Verilog1. At my old company, we had a team of formal methods PhD’s who wrote a linter that typechecked our code,...
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