Publications

On our C4DT publications page, you will find a wealth of information on our latest research in the digital trust space. Our publications are organized into different categories, including “Focus,” “Observers,” “Public Events,” “Annual Report,” and “Factory.”

Factory

`cargo-tarpaulin`: code coverage for Rust

Coverage? Testing is one of the most important step of code validation. One would argue that an untested code is akin to a rogue program destroying what it can in its way. But what tests the testing? How do you know that your testing infrastructure is indeed simulating most behaviors of your code? Here comes (...)

Discovering Nix

What is Nix? I recently had the opportunity to play with Nix, which is a package manager and an OS based on this package manager. Nix is special in the sense that it claims to only make reproducible builds that can’t break the system. But how? The package manager is “purely functional”, which means that (...)

Rust vs. Haskell

  vs. Today we looked at the following article, which compares Rust and Haskell: https://serokell.io/blog/rust-vs-haskell Even though I did some dabbling in Haskell, I never understood how close the two are. Currently I think I’m quite proficient in Rust, so I can follow the article quite well on that side. While the basic concepts seem (...)

Mob programming – Adventofcode Day 12

During the month of December, Advent of Code passes out a new puzzle every day. The daily challenges are a fun way to learn new algorithms and getting to know new ways of programming. In our software engineering team we followed along at least the first half of the programming challenges and enjoyed discussing the solutions (...)

eBPF: fast bytecode for the kernel

Why? Nowadays, Linux is deployed in many component of the network fabric. Your home NAT probably runs it, your datacenter’s router also. As it needs to handle incoming packet on gigabits links, the speed at which the system handles the packets becomes important. If you run your router in user-space, the kernel needs to read (...)

Revisiting Kademlia

For a side-project of mine I’m looking at Kademlia (Wikipedia), which is used in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. One problem of P2P systems is that nodes come and go randomly. So it’s not easy to retrieve stored data. Where to store data? And then how to find it again? What happens if a node with the (...)

What is DevOps?

DevOps is rather a confusing term. Everyone uses it a lot and not everyone is able to define what it really means. Here are some thoughts of what our team think when we hear DevOps: CI/CD. Source-code, compilation. Kubernetes, Ops responsabilities. Automated tests. These are some good talking point, as they definitely have to be (...)

Developer skill matrix

Some time ago I read the developer skill matrix and thought it was very interesting. I put it in the infamous “Read later” bookmark folder, and actually came back to it! So last Monday, during our regular group catchup time, I presented this page. In fact every week one of us three engineers presents something (...)