Finding out if I've Improved as a Programmer: Part 1

Do you ever wonder how far you've come as a programmer? Well, I sometimes do, and today, I've decided to take a look and see if I've made any progress. I think that I have. I certainly have spent a lot of time studying and practicing to be a better programmer, not to mention the years of projects I've worked on in my career, making a living of this fascinating endeavor of instructing computers to perform automated tasks. One hopes that all of that effort hasn't gone to waste.

If I look back at one of my early projects, I should be able to easily see ways to improve it to make it clearer and cleaner. If I can't, well, what have I been doing all of these years? I decided to pluck a project from my operating systems course in college, good old CS537 from UW-Madison. It's a simple introductory project that implements a basic shell in C. The shell can execute commands either in an interactive mode from a prompt, or read commands from a file given to the shell as an argument when it starts. It's a small enough project that I can evaluate it in a couple blog posts, but not so small as to be trivial, like FizzBuzz or the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

Let's Refactor Some Bad Code, Part 3

To quickly recap, we're refactoring some code I found that implements a rainflow counting algorithm. I used this code as a model to implement a real time algorithm for use in a data acquisition system, but before I could do that effectively, I needed to basically rewrite the code so that I could understand it better. I started off by making some tests and running it through an auto-formatter. Then I improved the UI so that I could run the model more quickly. Now it's time to work through the main part of the algorithm and make it more clear and understandable. Once again, you can view all of the commits at my GitHub repo to see side-by-side diffs of the changes to the code.