If you’ve ever worked on a significant software development project you’ve probably looked at some part of your process and said ‘we have to change this!’ More often than not the topic is the software production process: that problematic build-test-release cycle. We can all identify places where our process is slow or broken; so why [Read More →]

Andy Glew’s written a piece over on his blog opining about the need for automatic discovery of dependencies and some applications of having that data. Understanding dependencies is a requirement for any (reasonable) build tool, and all build tools allow the specification of dependencies – even shell script: specifying a serial order lets you define [Read More →]

One of the well known problems with make is that it’s a real nuisance to completely specify all the dependencies in your project. For example, if you have a file main.c in your project, you probably already have a dependency like this in your makefile: main.o: main.c However, if main.c includes logging.h, you technically need [Read More →]

I spend most of my time with ElectricAccelerator working on the “big” features — performance, scalability, fault-tolerance. It’s easy to forget that there are a ton of “little” features that can themselves make a big difference in the value of the system. Case in point: the build log. If you have any experience with parallel [Read More →]