I took to the twitterverse to share a toy project I recently shared on github - I've been goofing off for the last few weeks on a retro 16-bit virtual system I'm calling "MPU", with graphics and sound, and programmed in its own assembly language. Check it out at https://t.co/FNUvy80fAX #golang pic.twitter.com/zdxFniFb6p — Jason Sando (@jasonrsando) March 15, 2022 I was working my way through the 2021 Advent of Code puzzles to practice Test-Driven Design in Go, and I got bored.

Your unit tests can have 100% code coverage, and your code still sucks and is full of bugs. “But how Jason?!” Bad assertions, or worse: no assertions at all! Essentially, the tests aren’t validating the results, they’re just running the code in every path so that your code coverage report shows 100%. I’ve seen a dev spend weeks (!) getting to the 100% code coverage goal, and yet the software released still had serious (ie, financial liability) bugs.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last 10+ years shipping embedded Linux devices, and thought I’d do a write up of the state of embedded Linux things as I see them as of March 2019. I will cover both how to build the OS image for mass-production (from a high level), as well as programming language selection. The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.