We live in an era of fast-changing and often ill defined user requirements. The conventional software development model of plan > code > test can more often than not fail to produce software that meets user requirements in a reasonable amount of time. One alternative is a three-stage process that allows us to iteratively learn what the users really want, and if all goes well develop better software faster…

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For the casual, not so casual, and advanced users who would like to integrate subwoofers to their music or home theater systems…

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A short poem on software and their bugs as far as the eye can see…

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I don’t like to exercise. I mostly think of it as a distraction, but what bothers me the most is the amount of time spent for exercise could have been dedicated to other, you know, more fun activities. We all need to exercise regularly to stay in shape and be healthy. I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but if exercise takes too much time, I know I wouldn’t do it. So, I needed a compromise…

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I still remember a quote from a computer magazine I read when I was 12. In an article comparing the programming languages of the time, a C developer described the Pascal programming language as “having a mother hen hovering over you, watching your every move, making sure you don’t screw up.” I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but he was most likely referring to the strong type checking in Pascal, which could lead to compiler and runtime errors…

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I write because I want to share what I know with others. Yet the software developer in me makes writing hard for me. See, in coding the internal structure needs to be consistent. The code we write is like a house of cards. If we make even one tiny mistake, the whole thing may come falling down. So, when I write, I try to be consistent, which is not a bad thing in itself of course, but the desire for consistency makes writing a lot more difficult for me than it should be…

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First a little context: At Faradai we had been using PostgreSQL on the ext4 file system for a number of years until it recently became evident that the constantly growing database size (over 5 TB at the time) would start to cause issues in general performance, cloud costs, and the ability to have reliable backups. We reviewed a number of alternative file systems, and chose ZFS mainly for its following three features…

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