Posts tagged CodeXorArchitect
Why? the ADR!
- 2026/10/20
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1min46
- LinkedIn:
June 1996: The maiden flight of Ariane 5 –a €666M rocket– failed, with a big explosion!
But Why?
You probably remember: it was a software flaw. An expensive one, but not a very complicated one. Or, as studies show, a couple of them. Some dead code, a calculation overflow, and faulty error handling. Each of them shouldn’t happen —but can you guarantee that your system doesn’t have them?
But Why? Why did the code have those kinds of stupid mistakes?
Or maybe more importantly: How can you, as an architect, prevent them?
Two Cups Behaviour
- 2026/10/06
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1min31
- LinkedIn:
I always wonder why the Ultimo Superior Brewmaster luxury coffee machines only discover they are low on water after
brewing the first shot when the double-cup option is selected. Its water sensor can differentiate between espresso
and regular coffee, but somehow it forgets that two cups need more water too.
What a stupid behaviour!
Debounce Noise
- 2026/09/29
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1min19
- LinkedIn:
Everybody likes to push buttons. And every engineer knows you must debounce them to avoid noise. But who
decides how to do that? Is there a best strategy? Today we do a deep dive and consider all details that might be
architecturally important.
And, as we will see, we might even find some noise in the organization.
NoCode Architecting
- 2026/09/22
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1min13
- LinkedIn:
An architect isn’t a bricklayer, so why should a software architect write code? Don’t they have more important work?
This is a hard question and depends heavily on subjective personal preferences. But avoiding the question degrades
the craft.
So, what is a genuine embedded systems/software architect? And how do you become one?
Scaling Big (1)
- 2026/09/15
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1m17
- LinkedIn:
You shouldn’t build a 350m-high skyscraper like a bike shed; likewise, Linux (35M lines of code) needed a different
principle than HelloWorld. All software starts small, though. Once, Linux fit on a single page.
Architecture helps to scale! E.g., Linux is based on the ‘Common Unix Architecture’, with drivers, CPU abstraction,
file- & networking-I/O, etc. Even version v0.0.1 of the Linux kernel used it.
Global Details
- 2026/09/14
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
1min5
- LinkedIn:
Any senior (embedded) software engineer knows (s)he should focus on details, as the devil is in those details. But
what is a detail?
Often, a client —as a user— will focus on the most important pieces and call everything else a detail: “We
hardly use that”. Yet they still assume every part is bug-free.
The costs of a mistake
- 2026/08/13
- Nederlands
- LinkedIn-Post
- reading-time:
59 sec
- LinkedIn:
A typical code bug takes between one hour and one week to solve. Annoying, but the costs are minor — a few thousand euros at most. Sure, a bug escaping your sprint is a bit more expensive. And once it hits production, it can increase sevenfold.
But what about an architectural mistake? Let’s be honest: it is just as easy to make. Just a few lines in a 256-page
document. But if it’s a real architectural error, it is fundamentally wrong! Let us take a trivial example: choosing the
(wrong) programming environment for a new, modern Embedded System. That can be the OS, the language, or an open-source
library.
And yes, those mistakes have been made …