Designing In The Rain
By Jon McDonald Recently I was running some errands on my motorcycle when I got caught in the rain. Living in Florida, this is a fairly common summer occurrence. Generally, as long as it’s not too much...
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Choosing The Right Kite
By Jon McDonald At my 16-year-old son’s suggestion the two of us have been taking kite-surfing lessons. Last weekend part of the lesson covered the different kinds of kites, how they compare and...
View ArticleThe Real Value Of Test
By Jon McDonald Sometimes one test is worth a thousand code reviews. Perhaps not a thousand, but it is a very significant number. Not that this is a new idea, but I’ve had a couple of experiences...
View ArticleShow Me
By Jon McDonald Many people—engineers especially, myself included—are naturally biased against change. To get an organization to change takes significant energy. This isn’t a new trend. Much of the...
View ArticleThe Fine Art Of Compromise
By Jon McDonald Ask 10 people a question and you might get 10 different answers. Ask 10 software engineers what they need in a hardware platform and you might get more than 10 different answers because...
View ArticleKeep The Silos
By Jon McDonald I’ve had a couple of conversations recently in which software developers expressed that they have little interest in working with hardware or systems developers. The general sentiment...
View ArticleThe Best Abstraction
By Jon McDonald The other day I was asked what would be the best level of abstraction to model at for system-level design. This is a question I get, in one form or another, far too often. It reminds me...
View ArticleSimple Economics
By Jon McDonald I was watching one of the MIT OpenCourseWare videos the other day. It was one of the lectures on Computer Science. I believe it was Prof. Robert Gallager who made a statement that...
View ArticleGarbage Or Treasure?
By Jon McDonald “Garbage in, garbage out” is a very appropriate axiom to keep in mind as you consider what kind of system-level modeling to invest in. Unfortunately this can be complicated by...
View ArticleMaking Time to Do It Right
By Jon McDonald Change can be a very difficult thing. Most organizations I talk to about adopting system-level design know it’s a worthwhile investment. They believe it will have a positive return....
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