We are hiring at Feldera, so I have been talking to many software engineers. These calls tend to reveal where the “meta of software engineering” is at. Often the signal is that there isn’t a good signal and people are looking for new opportunities for various reasons. This time it’s different: Senior engineers who were interviewing kept raising the same complaint. These engineers now review an…
I remember while this bug wasn’t that hard to fix (or find), it still had some “fantastic” potential to it. Because, when it appeared, at first nothing made sense anymore… When programming, it happens occasionally that you end up with a dead-end: A branch in the code that you determine will never be taken by the CPU with absolute certainty. However, due to limitations in the language or the…
Some bugs are hard to find because when they manifest, they do so in a very misleading way. This one is about fairly unexpected consequences when things aren’t properly aligned. Most of the time alignment problems lead to “just” bad performance. In some other cases, hardware architectures may generate a fault on misaligned accesses (but this is easy to pin-point and fix). However, in our case the…
It was a particularly mischievous bug. At the time, we were writing a new research prototype kernel in our group. Research operating systems are fun because you typically end up writing a lot of code until you get something very basic (like print) running. In fact, it’s often the case that you end up with a system or function call which can’t be fully implemented at the moment (because it would…