In an ideal world there would be no need to comment code. We wouldn't have to spend time writing comments, rewriting comments, reading comments, or scrolling past comments to find the next block of code. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in.

Code comments are a help line for your PR reviewer, your coworkers, and your future self that might just help them out on their darkest day. It can feel like a chore. Comments can even detract from your work when done poorly. But when done well, comments can be be immensely helpful.

It has been a while since I found time to release something as open source. I always worry if it is good enough, but rather than let great get in the way of good I released two simple tasks for phing last week.

Over the years many systems have been proposed for specifying what to code. Design documents, rapid iteration, user stories, and business rules all have strengths and weaknesses. What they have in common is that they are tools, tools which take skill to wield. Experience has shown that we can lower the learning curve for these tools by introducing formalities. At my day job, my team has embarked on using Gherkin for writing business rules.

At first, a lack of relevant examples held us back. Later, we found ourselves working against the syntax. But over time we have learned a number of lessons both about what works and what doesn't. Allow me to share with you what I have learned.

I had a need to detect the presence of magnets especially small grain of sand sized magnets such as those found in certain mineral samples. The ideal tool for the job would be a magnetometer with milli-Gauss sensitivity and the ability to measure the strength of static (non oscillating) magnetic fields. I also didn’t want to spend a fortune on it especially since it was not important to us to measure the field strength only detect it. After searching the likely suppliers I realized there was not a commercial solution that would work. Fortunately, there are readily available breakout boards which expose an i2c interface to an LSM303 series accelerometer/magnetometer sensor; so I could build my own.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

If you are using a Linux PC to upload a firmware application to an Arduino compatible but not an Arduino brand device sometimes you will get the oddest errors. On Adafruit brand boards this will be accompanied by odd LED pulsing even after double tapping the reset button to put the board in bootloader mode. The fix is fairly simple…

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Back in 2005 there was just a single way to program an Arduino; the Arduino IDE. Today in 2019 the concept of “what is an Arduino” has changed from a microcontroller produced by a single vendor to arguably any board that can be programmed using the Arduino IDE. And in this time, a variety of methods for programming Arduinos* beyond the Arduino IDE have been released. The goal of this post is to list and compare some methods in use at Bucknell.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Interrupts have a reputation for being tricky and an unnecessary complication to just get code running. This reputation is however ill-deserved. Interrupts when used correctly simplify code, speed execution on hardware, and allow projects to do more with less powerful hardware.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

I worked for a regional technology support company for a number of years and noticed that I kept having the same basic conversations with clients. After one particularly frustrating day of answering the same question over and over again, I started writing, collecting my answers together and putting some time into editing them. I ended up writing a bit more than I expected and it ended up being a useful. It is a bit dated now but most of it still holds true.

Originally published at https://greenneondesign.com

Over the course of my career I've been asked numerous times to "fix" a website. Something I have noticed is that most times the broken nature of the website has been due to a previous developer going out of their way to work against the inherent structures and default styling of web pages. I suspect this is because many designers pick up a tool and start using it without understanding what the tool does. Imagine if a woodcrafter picked a block plane out of a bin at a rummage sale then tried to build a dining room table without using any other tools. Personally I find that understanding the material is extremely important to success which is why I threw together a sampler of built in HTML elements with minimal styling. I continue to refer to this sampler when starting new projects and have found a zen of minimalist markup when crafting web sites.