A blog about software engineering, programming languages and technical tinkering
Posted by Simon Larsén in Blog
After five long years of studies (seven if you include the two years of materials science), I've finally graduated with an MSc in Computer Science and Engineering from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. I'm still awaiting my degree certificates, but the thesis is published and I don't have to do …
Posted by Simon Larsén in Linux
On any Linux distribution, there's a file located at /etc/passwd. This file
contains information about users that exist on the system, including their
username, user id, group id and more. In this short article, I'll outline the
structure of the /etc/passwd file, and also illuminate why it doesn't …
Posted by Simon Larsén in Testing
This is the first part of a series of small articles detailing some of the
functionality of the pytest testing
framework that I find most essential. The series assumes you know how to run
tests with pytest already.
In this first part, we'll take a look at the -v and …
Posted by Simon Larsén in Programming
In this article, we are going to have a look at a method that accepts an option. That is to say, it accepts an argument that somehow decides how it operates. If you use a lot of libraries in your day-to-day programming, you're bound to come across methods that accept …
Posted by Simon Larsén in Programming
Null references are problematic, to say the least. Tony Hoare (inventor of the null reference) even went as far to say call them his "billion dollar mistake". In this article, I first make a cursory exploration of why null references are so problematic, and then have a look at Java's …