Arjen Lentz and Tobias Eggendorfer - Snakes in the grass! How to improve code quality and development processes
Abstract
Arjen recently found an actual bug in the vital *nix tool sudo. Eek!? Don’t panic though, and we will tell the rest of that story in the talk, as it’s a fairly good example of what we’re talking about. But we will say here that the bug had been there for a few years, and had not been caught by the regular Coverity scans.
So, have we got your firm attention now? Good! (to be clear: nothing bad about the maintainer of sudo, he’s an awesome lad.) We would like to talk with you about preventing (yes!) problems in your code. We’ll mainly discuss C, but the strategies can also be applied elsewhere.
We will go over the various aspects that will result in your code building “clean”, with any items of possible concern becoming clearly visible. Extra tools to help you will also be covered (open source, and references to others). And we’ll go beyond just Linux, and also look at other environments.
Sure, older coders (with beards?) and even some younger ones may find all this old news, however the newer generations can benefit, and even better: our compilers and tooling is smarter now than it used to be. So that’s great!
And while we haven’t found any other nasty snakes (so far), there is an awful lot of grass. Some of that grass is old, and has grown from very bad coding habits. We’ll show a few examples of that, too, and how we can mow at least some of it.
Overall, this should be a most enjoyable and educational session, with quite a few valuable takeaways for the attendees.
Biography
Arjen Lentz
Arjen was born in Amsterdam, but now lives near Brisbane (“Meanjin”) on Australia’s East Coast with his wife Claire (the kids have flown the coop). In another handful of years, he’ll have lived in Australia as long as he was in The Netherlands. Why did he move in the first place, you ask? Well, the subtropical climate, the space, and fewer “tall poppy” (boven het maaiveld uitsteken) problems.
Arjen started with programming in a heavily air-conditioned basement room of a local youth club, on a PDP-8/VT78 terminal with 8" floppies (BASIC and assembly), but soon he managed to get hold of an Acorn BBC/B, featuring a 6502 CPU running at a whopping 2 MHz. 32 KB RAM, permanent storage via cassette tape…
Arjen has worked in the fields of programming (mostly C), databases (at MySQL he wrote part of the manual, and did some other stuff), training, consulting, and most recently information “cyber!” security. Along the way has also run his own company, made a lot of mistakes, and learnt many things.
Arjen has presented at many open source and other conferences, across three continents: on topics such as databases, open source, business, and mental health. He has even talked at NLUUG and SANE a few times, about 20 years ago, mostly on the topic of MySQL.
For this NLUUG 2024 Najaarsconferentie, Arjen will sadly be merely present in spirit, with Tobias doing the talking locally.
Tobias Eggendorfer
Tobias career startet much the same way as Arjen’s, except for the aircon - Commodore CBM and later an Apple IIe were his first computers. More than a handful years at school later, he studied informatics and some other stuff, continued on to receive a PhD on email security and anti-spam, became a professor for IT-forensics in Hamburg, later for IT-security in Ravensburg, left academia to “cyber”, literally a Germany’s “Cyberagentur”, a national agency supervised by the German DoD and ministery for interior affairs, where he was head of the “Secure Systems” department. The agency funds and co-ordinates research in cyber-security which has the potential to be disruptive within a few years. When he left the agency, he kept cybering, but returned to academia and is now a professor for cybersecurity in Ingolstadt. As foreseen for academics, he’s published loads of papers, some books, and gave talks at many conferences - including some AUUG conference, where Arjen and Tobias met.
