Looking at S-Core today feels a bit like walking into a German factory that has just announced a “major transformation initiative.” Before anything actually starts to change, there are: The intention is good, but as my colleague from work pointed out some time ago: “bureaucracy expands to meet the needs…
Recently I came across a Reddit thread where someone asked: “I was thinking about using an Arduino, but I have been learning Python and do not want to learn a whole other programming language to do basic things that an Arduino can. (Planning on making a robot, will be using…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! In one of the recent articles, I showed how to build and run Docker containers using CMake. Today, we will see how to do a similar thing, but using Bazel. Today’s project structure: Note: on the contrary to the project structure used in the article…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Bash comes with a bunch of useful, built-in commands. One of them is timeout which allows you to run another command with a time limit. The syntax is simple: To avoid providing large numbers for long timeouts, duration parameter accepts suffixes which mark the exact…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! If you haven’t read the previous pikoTutorial on setting up a Python project with CMake, you may want to check it out first because in today’s article I’ll be using the setup we’ve done there: However, I will extend it with the test directories…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! FetchContent module tries to be the solution to never-ending discussion about the package management in C++ (I wrote a bit about it in one of the articles of Make C++ a better place series). It’s not a package manager by itself, but it integrates…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! The error we’re handling today is a C++ compilation error: What does it mean? It often occurs when the compiler encounters a place in the code where it would normally expect a static member function, but the actual function is not static. Let’s say…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! In one of the recent articles, I showed how to use CMake for setting up a Python project. Today, we will see how to further extend it by adding building of Docker images to the CMakeLists.txt files. Today’s project structure: Top CMakeLists.txt file Nothing…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! Linux terminal is a basic tool for many software engineers and the place where we often spend a lot of our time during the work day. Even if you’re not doing anything in the terminal right now, it is for sure opened for the…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! What is a folding expression? Imagine that you have a vector of integers and you need to add some predefined values to it. The obvious choice seems to be just using push_back() function applied a couple of times: This works, but look how much…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! Recently I’m experimenting with different ways of error handling in Python and I stumbled upon a use case in which it would be very helpful to create an enum by deriving from a different enum. Use case Let’s say we design an interface for…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! The error we’re handling today is a C++ compilation error: Or a similar one: What does it mean? This error occurs in situations when you provide a declaration of a type, but don’t provide definition of that type. For example, if I try to…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! In the first article of Trying ROS2 series I showed how to implement and examine a basic publisher and subscriber within a single Docker container. Now it’s time for checking out how do you implement and set up a client/server connection within a single…
The Go programming language brings simplicity and a clear design philosophy that make it attractive for developers who are tired of the complexity of C++. In this article, we will explore the most interesting features of the Go language that distinguish it from C++. Producer/consumer implementation with Go If you…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! Conversion from hexadecimal to decimal Add the following function to your .bashrc file: Usage: Conversion from decimal to hexadecimal Add the following function to your .bashrc file: Usage:
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! CMake is often associated only with C/C++ and occupies a high place in the ranking of the most hated tools. Today, I want to show an unusual, but interesting use case – setting up and running Python applications with CMake and its underlying generators.…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! Let’s consider a simple project with the following structure: The main function has 2 compile switches: And we have 2 separate Bazel configurations including these switches: When we build the application with the following command: I can run the application by invoking: But as…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! I’ve worked with ROS 1 on various projects, but with its end-of-life approaching in 2025, it felt for me like the perfect time to dive into ROS 2. In this article you’ll read about: Project structure Let’s first define a project structure to understand…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! The error we’re handling today is a ROS runtime error: Typically occurring when calling ROS commands like: What does it mean? To understand where does this error come from, you must understand 2 ROS concepts: Underlay allows you to create in your terminal a…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The minimal receiver Note for beginners: do not remove line 14 from the receiver implementation! Without the ability to re-use the same address, you will not be able to run more than 1 multicast receiver and you’ll end up with a simple UDP client/server setup.…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! What’s the problem? Let’s take a look at the simple example below: Let’s quickly sum up what’s going on here and what could be the expected output of such program: To understand why it happens, let’s add a custom deleter to the unique pointer,…
Below you can find the code that we will be reviewing today. Before you scroll down to section where I fix it, feel free to check how many mistakes you can find. Without running this code, one could expect that the output which it generates looks like this: But when…
The D programming language, commonly known as DLang, offered a fresh perspective on system-level programming by blending familiar features of C++ with modern mechanisms to enhance code safety, simplicity, and performance. Created by Walter Bright, it is meant to be a viable alternative to C++ for developers seeking to improve…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Imagine you’re building an application that processes some data and once it’s done, the user needs to be notified about the result. Since you don’t want to hard-code the notification logic, it’s better to allow the user to register a custom function that will be…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The error we’re handling today is a C++ compilation error: What does it mean? In C++, the error occurs when you try to invoke a function that has been explicitly marked as deleted or implicitly deleted by the compiler. This error commonly arises in relation…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial ! The minimal TCP server A TCP server listens for incoming connections on a specified port and communicates with clients over that connection. The minimal TCP client A TCP client establishes a connection with a server, sends data, and receives responses. Bidirectional communication You can…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The select keyword in shell scripting provides an easy way to present a list of options to the user and handle their selection. It is particularly useful when you have a predefined set of choices and want the user to pick one. When you run…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! nullptr and the segmentation fault One of the first things that beginner C++ programmers realize after starting to play around with pointers is that dereferencing a nullptr leads to an immediate program crash caused by the segmentation fault. This leads to a common belief that…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The error we’re handling today is a C++ compilation error: What does it mean? The requirement for main to return an integer stems from convention and standardization within the programming languages. In C and C++, the main function is typically defined with a return type…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Imagine you’re developing an application that fetches data from external API. For example, a weather app might request current weather conditions for a list of cities and then display them. While the data is updated periodically, repeatedly querying the API with the same city is…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! If you ever wanted to ensure a consistent environment for your application, you most probably know that containerization is the way to go. To containerize a Python application, let’s first set up a simple file structure: Now add a simple Python application: Note for beginners:…
In this article, we will explore how CppFront aims to make C++ a better place by introducing a new syntax, improving safety and usability and providing modern features that align with good programming practices – all while maintaining full interoperability with C++. The origins and philosophy of CppFront CppFront is…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Parameterized unit tests are priceless. They help to test code thoroughly through multiple possible input values, without having to write multiple and almost the same unit tests – if you have a function accepting an enum and output for some of them is the same,…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Short for “Client URL,” curl is a command-line tool and library for transferring data with URLs. It supports various protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SCP, SFTP, LDAP, and more. Basic usage At its core, curl allows you to fetch content from or send content…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The reduce function is a powerful tool placed in the functools module that facilitates the cumulative application of a function to the items of an iterable (from left to right), to reduce them to a single value. Initially introduced in Python 2, later moved to…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The error we’re handling today is a Python runtime error: What does it mean? The “too many values to unpack” error typically occurs when there is a mismatch between the number of variables or elements being unpacked and the number of values being assigned. This…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! What are C++ literals? Literals in C++ are constant values directly embedded into the code, such as numbers, characters and strings. They represent fundamental data, making the code more readable and expressive. C++ provides several built-in literals, like integer literals (42), floating-point literals (3.14), and…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! What is hash? The hash command in Linux is a built-in shell utility used to optimize the execution of commands by recording paths of the invoked commands, so subsequent executions don’t need to search through the PATH variable again. You can see it in action…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Print exceptions traceback after catching them Consider the following example code that raises an exception: When we run it, we see the following output: The traceback provides detailed information, including where the error occurred, the exception type, and the error message. However, the downside is…
Below you can find the code that we will be reviewing today. Before you scroll down to section where I fix it, feel free to check how many mistakes you can find. This function is meant to take a list of strings, count the occurrences of each individual string and…
Let’s define word “better” In the title of this series, I used the term “better”, but as an engineer, I can’t begin my research with such a vague objective. The world of software engineering is so complex and varied that word “better” can have very different meanings depending on the…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! When dealing with enumerations in C++, developers have two primary options: traditional enum and enum class. Traditional enums vs enum classes At the first glance, the only difference appears to be in the class keyword: The real difference is however in how both of them…
A segmentation fault, often referred to as a ‘segfault,’ is a specific kind of error encountered in computing when a program tries to access a memory location that it is not allowed to access.
Unlike TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), UDP is connectionless, meaning it does not require a handshake process to establish a connection before data transmission.
Unlike symbolic (soft) links, which point to a file by its pathname, hard links are direct pointers to the file’s inode.
To ensure a certain order of function calls, GTest provides 2 ways to do that: InSequence and Sequence objects.
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The error we’re handling today is a Git error: which occurs when trying to copy file from another branch using command: What does it mean? It means that the commit hash you provided was not recognized by Git as a valid object which could be…
yield is a well known keyword in Python which allows to optimize the code by generating data streams on the fly instead of generating the same data all at once.
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! What’s the problem? Imagine that you are working on a feature branch called target_branch and someone else commits some folder to another feature branch called source_branch. You need this folder, but these are completely different branches, with different changes and diverged history, so you can’t…
The world of software development is built on dreams of engineers who aspired to create their own programming languages.
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! std::move moves an object One of the most prevalent misconceptions is that std::move actually moves an object. In reality, std::move does not perform any movement – it casts its argument to an rvalue reference. This enables the compiler to apply move semantics, but std::move itself…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! xargs reads items from standard input, delimited by blanks or newlines and executes the specified command with those items as arguments. Basic usage The most basic pattern of using xargs commands consists of 4 elements: Examples Create files basing on a text file Let’s assume…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Sometimes when writing unit test it is necessary to check not only if certain function has been called, but also the order in which functions have been called. To do that with unittest in Python, use the following code: If you change the order of…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! The error we’re handling today is a C++ linker error: What does it mean? In C++, an “undefined reference” error occurs during the linking stage. This error indicates that the linker cannot find the definition for a function, variable or object that has been declared…
Welcome to the next pikoTutorial! Building and running a single test file To present the easiest case, we need to assume some folder structure of our project: Here the easiest case means that we have only on library and only one test file for it. Firstly of all, we need…
At its most basic, the sort command sorts lines in a file alphabetically. For example, if you have a file named data.txt, you can print its sorted content with:
Below you can find the extended example of how to use PBKDF2HMAC key derivation function in Python.
Below you can find the code that we will be reviewing today. Before you scroll down, feel free to check how many mistakes you can find.
std::unique_ptr is one of the most common non-copyable types – types, whose constructor has been explicitly deleted in their implementation.
ISO C++ forbids declaration with no type – check what does it mean and how to fix that error.
One of the simplest ways to perform symmetric encryption in Python is to use Fernet algorithm from cryptography module. Let’s see how to use it.
ip command was designed to replace older networking tools like ifconfig, route or netstat. Learn about how to decode ip addr output.
Learn about 5 least known yet very useful utilities from STL like std::shared_mutex or std::clamp.
When you see the error message “Unable to index file” in Git, it typically indicates that Git has encountered an issue while trying to add a file to its index.
Changing function by modifying its implementation manually is obvious, but can we change the implementation of the function at runtime of the application?
If you ever wanted to ensure a consistent environment for your application, you most probably know that containerization is the way to go.
Nowadays there are many high level languages in which you don’t have to care about how objects are copied around. However, if you want to write in C++, you must understand that copying is a very distinct operation.
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