Humbling experience
Today a short day because we’re going to say goodbye to 2020 (finally) tonight! But, I experienced something very humbling. I ran into memory issues on the Unu, and it took a bit of time before I realized it.
I started to implement the communication with the flight simulator software. All of a sudden I started to witness strange behavior in the software. Things that worked before, didn’t anymore. I took well over 2 hours before I realized there might be some memory issues.
Low and behold, when I removed some of the code I added (which had some hard coded strings in them), the software was back to normal again. Adding these variables brought back the issues.
It makes me realize that modern day developers in the managed code space, with Gigabytes of memory available have it very good. Compilers warn you before the code runs, garbage collectors clean up stuff, and if you need another variable, you simply declare it.
I am from the old days where 4K memory was the norm. The Uno has only 2K memory, so it’s even worse than the old days.
But, I also really like this experience. It challenges me even more in getting the best software out there. I will have to unlearn some things that I am now accustomed to, but I’ll get there.
But not this year. We’re going to wave goodby to 2020 very, very shortly and let’s hope for a better year in 2021.
HAPPY NEW YEAR everybody!