A Lesson In Low-Defect Software (sqlite.org)

The slides and video for D. Richard Hipp’s talk on the development of SQLite.

It’s no secret SQLite is one of my favourite databases. A project with one comment per two lines of code, and where the test data vastly outnumbers the code by more than seven hundred to one—it’s an incredibly reliable piece of software, with a level of engineering discipline I can only aspire too.

Despite some pseudoscience in the talk about left and right brains, there is a clear moral here: Document your code, and document the changes. Write defensive code and thoroughly test it. Fix the processes that lead to bugs, not just the buggy code.