Over the years I have accepted contracts to modify existing computer programs to add new features. In all of them, without exception, I found lots of commented-out code in the source code. The commented-out code was no help. Keeping commented-out code is a bad practice. “Clean Code, A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship,” by Rober...

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Computer Society has a Software Engineering Code of Ethics. I think the IEEE Code of Ethics is excellent, providing essential principles and guidelines. The first principle in their Code is, "Software engineers shall act consistently with the public interest." You can read t...

In 1968 Edgar Dijkstra wrote a letter to the editor to Association for Computing Machinery (AMC) about the go to statement in computer programs, titled “Go To Statement Considered Harmful.” He said: “For a number of years I have been I have been familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of t...

Design reviews, which can take many forms, are needed in the design of complex systems. A design review provides you, or your team, with a critique by other programmers or engineers. When you are asking the questions in a design review, follow the advice found in “Practical Reliability Engineering,” by Patrick D.T. O’Connor and Andre K...

Opportunity, a rover NASA landed on Mars in 2004, is an example of excellence. NASA declared Opportunity’s mission complete on February 12, 2019. After Opportunity’s watch ended, the Salt Lake City Tribune reported, “Engineered to last only three months, Oppy persevered for nearly 15 years and traveled over 28 miles, working longer and...

My name is Michael Jablonski and I have been designing and coding software, professionally, since 1982. Over the years I have worked with terrible software, exceptional software, and everything in-between. In this blog I will share snippets about software and digital systems, good and bad, that I think are interesting. My plan is to ad...