Articles by Sam Thursfield

Outreachy is an organisation providing open source internships to people who are subject to systemic bias and underrepresentation. Find out about the project we helped to run: "Improve end-to-end testing for GNOME"

Codethink's latest FOSS contribution in automated hardware testing. This article will talk about our recent tool named Q.A.D. and its impact on end-user blackbox hardware testing.

Once upon a time, you could design and build a device, flash a well-engineered firmware onto it and support it for 20 years, with minimal changes to the core software. Those days are over. A new approach is needed to provide long-term support for devices while managing the complexity of today’s embedded software stacks.

As in years past, Codethink will again be at the FOSDEM conference! An official sponsor of the event, we are pleased that more than 30 Codethings will be present and participating.

The Python package archive PyPI is a hugely successful platform for sharing open source libraries and applications. In this article we'll provide some ideas on safely using PyPI, taking into account some recent malware attacks that were delivered via the platform.

YAML's data model can represent arbitrary data, so when an app parses a YAML document it might get back anything. It's up to the developer to check that the data is structured how the app expects and to control what happens when it isn't. Does it report an error to the user? Is the behaviour undefined? Does it crash?

Codethink continues to participate in the promising RISC-V ecosystem, and we have exciting news around Freedesktop SDK and GNOME.

High quality releases require high quality testing infrastructure. To show how deep OS and GUI testing can be done, let's look at the OpenQA instance we helped set up for GNOME.

When something as exciting as a completely open CPU architecture comes along, it's hard to stop Codethink's engineers from getting involved. We've set up an internal research project with the goal of learning about RISC-V, and we have some interesting results already.

Sam and Mike continue their post about the Teufel build process, talking about the implementation of a reliable caching mechanism.

Within companies producing devices, product progress continues to drive complexity and creates legacy challenges. Codethink senior engineers Sam Thursfield and Michael Drake explain how a recent embedded project for high end Home Entertainment demanded working with a complex Buildroot setup. This delivered major build time benefits, enabling rapid continuous integration.