Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Top 5 Things I’ve Learnt about Git

Director at Feabhas Limited
Co-Founder and Director of Feabhas since 1995.
Niall has been designing and programming embedded systems for over 30 years. He has worked in different sectors, including aerospace, telecomms, government and banking.
His current interest lie in IoT Security and Agile for Embedded Systems.
Niall Cooling

During the last couple of years, internally we’ve moved over to using Git as our Revision Control System (RCS). It’s been an interesting exercise, especially where, like me, you’ve come from a traditional model (such as subversion or even back to good old SCCS). I’m sure you’ve all got your own “top 5” and I don’t necessarily expect you to agree with me, but here’s my key learning points:

#1 “Branch always, branch often”
At the outset this was […]

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The hokey-cokey* of function calls

Technical Consultant at Feabhas Ltd
Glennan is an embedded systems and software engineer with over 20 years experience, mostly in high-integrity systems for the defence and aerospace industry.

He specialises in C++, UML, software modelling, Systems Engineering and process development.
Glennan Carnie

Functions are the lifeblood of a C program. The program flow is altered by passing parameters to functions, which are then manipulated. Conceptually function parameters are defined as being either:

Inputs (Read-only) – client-supplied objects manipulated within the function only
Outputs (Write-only) – objects generated by the function for use by the client.
Input-Outputs (Read-Write) – client objects that can be manipulated by the function.

Defining the use of a parameter gives vital information not only to the implementer, but (perhaps more importantly) to […]

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