Favorite Code Tricks Archives - Cove Mountain Software

Unit Testing of Active Objects and State Machines

Posted by Matthew Eshlemanon April 17, 2020April 27, 2020in Best Practices, Favorite Code Tricks, state charts, TDD, unit testingLeave a comment

How do we unit test an active object or state machine? This post explores techniques for successful unit testing of modules driven by state machines.

UML Statechart tip: Be wary of exit-state behavior

Posted by Matthew Eshlemanon February 19, 2020March 17, 2020in Best Practices, Commentary, Favorite Code Tricks3 Comments

Be wary of exit-state driven behavior when designing for UML statecharts.

Why I prefer C++: “RAII All The Things!”

Posted by Matthew Eshlemanon November 26, 2019July 7, 2020in Best Practices, C++11, Favorite Code TricksLeave a comment

Learn how the C++ RAII idiom enables better code with reduced maintenance overhead.

Why I love C++11 for Embedded Software and Firmware (or C++14, or…)

Posted by Matthew Eshlemanon February 13, 2018July 7, 2020in C++11, Commentary, Favorite Code Tricks3 Comments

In the firmware and embedded software engineering domains, engineers overwhelmingly choose C as their language of choice. Evidence of this may be seen in the following screen-grab of a presentation by Dan Saks at CppCon2016. I would recommend the entire presentation, which…

Brother, can you spare a GPIO?

Posted by Matthew Eshlemanon December 27, 2016in Favorite Code Tricks, Real Time, Research2 Comments

The core recommendation of this post will be familiar to an experienced embedded systems engineer, yet it is worthy of note and a useful trick for engineers learning their trade. The "trick" in question: Design embedded systems with accessible spare microcontroller…