I’m back! As always, I had a delightful August visiting friends and relatives in Canada. It was even more fun than usual because I’ve got a new boat. That is, a new-to-me boat; the boat is almost as old as I am. It’s a 1976 avocado-green Hobie 16. Here’s a video I shot of my first time trying it out: (I recommend watching it in HD resolution.)

Well enough chit-chat, back to programming language design. Today on the Coverity Development Testing Blog’s continuing series Ask The Bug Guys I’ll discuss how C++ is like a discredited theory of evolutionary biology and why that means you should not call a virtual method in a constructor.

Continue reading →

Here’s another fragment of the video interview I posted recently.

In this fragment I discuss the difference between analying IL and analyzing source code when trying to figure out if a defect exists. It turns out that you can get much better results by looking at the source code; there’s simply more information there. Being able to look at things like indentation and comments, where local variables were declared, and so on, makes a subtle but very real difference in the quality of the analysis.

This was an interesting video shoot for me. When I was at Microsoft I was used to Charles coming by with a hand-held camera and chatting with me off-camera, and then we’d pretty much post the whole thing. This was a much more involved production with lights, several camerapeople, multiple takes, and so on.[1. Also I find it amusing that they’ve changed the color saturation and tonality quite heavily; I’m not actually that pink, and the wall behind me is not green!]

Today is a few days short of my first anniversary of starting work at Coverity. It has been an extremely fun, educational and challenging year. I wanted a change, and I got one in a lot of ways. Working at a rapidly-growing, ten-year-old, 300-person company is very different than working at an industry behemoth like Microsoft. Working in a downtown Seattle skyscraper is a pleasant change from crossing the bridge to Redmond every day. I’ve spent the last six months doing a lot more strategy and planning than writing code, which I hope to rebalance back towards the coding side for the next six months. Continue reading →

Tech blogger George London is running an interesting series of video podcasts wherein he interviews programmers about their jobs and then asks them to recommend other programmers to interview. On his ninth hop through the social network he managed to get to me. If you have 75 minutes to spare, here’s our long and rambling interview from the ukulele storage room in the new Coverity office. Subjects covered include Coverity, Roslyn, the Commodore SuperPET 9000, rocket ships, Zork, woodworking, sailing, monads and teaching trigonometry to youngsters, and many more.