training – Roumazeilles.net

Signs that you’re a bad programmer

Yves Roumazeilles — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:49:58 +0000

Inability to reason about code
Poor understanding of the language’s programming model
Deficient research skills / Chronically poor knowledge of the platform’s features
Inability to comprehend pointers
Difficulty seeing through recursion
Inability to think in sets
Lack of critical thinking
Pinball Programming
Unfamiliar with the principles of security
Code is a mess
Inability to determine the order of program execution
Insufficient ability to think abstractly
Collyer Brothers syndrome
Dysfunctional sense of causality
Indifference to outcomes

Manufacturing of electronic boards

Yves Roumazeilles — Sat, 16 May 2009 11:31:46 +0000

Some of you may know that I work in the electronics industry (for automotive applications) with Johnson Controls. This is the reason why I am in daily contact with industrial means of manufacturing of complex electronic boards. For a long time now, I wanted to share some of the knowledge I acquired, some of the continuously renewed amazement I share in front of these industrial tools. But I could not really go and shoot photos in the manufacturing plants of my company.

Everything changes as I found some freely available information available on the Internet. For example, AMD-ATI (designer and manufacturer or graphics cards for personal computers) published a small presentation video.

Link to YouTube

You can’t see much, it’s too short? Here come detailled videos from the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits (IPC): IPC Training/Certification Videos. You will find there videos detailling all the stages of manufacturing and nearly all the significant technologies included in the manufacturing of electronic boards.

Most of them are available on YouTube and Google Video.

For those who went through all these steps and are still willing to learn, I also have a very intersting and much more technical presentation on a parallel issue and technology item: lead-free soldering. As a matter of fact, for years, the electronic industry has used a large quantity of lead (a cheap metal very attractive because it can become luidi at a relatively low temperature). but with the disappearance of a lot of the other sources of lead in our environment (lead poisonning (also known as saturnism, plumbism, Devon colic, or painter’s colic) is a medical condition caused by increased levels of the metal lead in the blood leading to neurological damage) electronic waste was adopting a bad sheep reputation. We are currently in the center of an intense transition to safer technologies. But it’s a whole industry which has to adopt completly new techniques and abandon very solid body of evidence and state of the art knowledge to learn uing “lead-free soldering”.

If you are ready for 30 minutes of concentration and listening, here is a video conference about this issue and a specific part of it: Electronics engineers like me will learn a lot about reliability of lead-free soldering.

Reliability of Lead-free Solder

Kata practice for the programmer

Yves Roumazeilles — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:16:54 +0000

A martial arts adept knows how much you have to repeat the same basic exercise (a kata) before mastering free fight. This is the same with most pianists who need to practice long and often to get reflexes, natural grace.

So, why not the same for programmers?

Dave Thomas decided to create basic exercises for the software developer. To be practiced continuously with not constraint of environment or language. He called it the Code Kata.

I no longer write a lot about software programming (I no longer code by myself nowadays) but it was such a great idea, a flash of light so obvious and elegant that I needed to share with you. No programmer should avoid the regular exercise of Code Kata. Many companies should also force their own software developers to apply it.