This is an annotated summary of my public contributions to ArduPilot to help communicate an evidence-backed sense of my software engineering style. A key theme is balancing the ArduPilot community's preferences and my own.
My largest project was improving ArduPilot's simulated battery model.
After an initial overstep of proposing too much preparatory cleanup at once, I authored a design proposal for the effort.
The initial groundwork was disentangling relevant objects and creating unit tests to ensure upcoming changes would not break functionality.
Then the main improvement came in many small-scope incremental PRs:
#32636,
#32637,
#32808,
#32810,
#32851,
#32852,
#32855,
#32897,
#33073,
#33074,
#33044,
#33045,
#33046.
These result in an improved and fully tested battery model.
The project will be complete when it is used in all five SITL vehicle types.
Another meaningful contribution came from solving issue #32491. After confirming it was not simply a documentation mismatch, the implementation iterated from a first attempt to the final landed behavior. While not apparent from the final result, that "main project thread" was interwoven with improving the existing test and making it more robust. For easier review, improvements to the in-repo documentation and wiki documentation were contributed separately. My final contributions were low-priority improvements to code clarity, test infrastructure, and test-infra clarity.
Bugs hide in small gaps between intent and implementation. A recurring theme in my smaller contributions is making navigation code say exactly what it means in naming, coordinate frames, and units.
In shared navigation libraries, I clarified distances and errors, then aligned related Nav Controller unit naming.
I added unit tests for AP_Math::kinematic_limit() after review and design discussion sharpened the expected behavior.
I also aligned AR_WPNav/Rover naming around "destination" rather than "desired location":
#32883,
#32884,
#32886,
#32887,
#32888,
#32890.
Some of this clarity work found real bugs. While fixing NED/NEU comment errors, I found a coordinate-frame mistake in executable code and split that into a separate behavior fix. I also fixed high-latency telemetry distance scaling where decimeters and decameters were mixed up.
I strongly believe clarity improvements—done verifiably, incrementally, and separately—are worth the cost.
I also make some small contributions that improve the daily experience of working in the project as I notice them.
Examples include fixing terminal color leakage from waf, improving the PR template, supporting macOS in no-compiler-change size comparisons, relaxing Markdown line-length linting, ignoring local cache directories so search tools return useful results, and replacing a deprecated git clone option in documentation.
On the test-infrastructure side, I hardened an external-AHRS autotest threshold.
I successfully proposed the new pattern of using keyword-only arguments to force clearer call sites in autotest helpers.
I resolved a longstanding SITL --param issue by removing the broken option after an earlier attempt to repair it prompted a project-level decision.
While I understand the arguments against low-value improvements, I generally disagree with them. At appropriately low priority I enhance clarity, improve tests, and leave niches of the system cleaner than I found them. Sadly, I have yet to find a metric for the value of "mistakes which never happened" to support this preference.
My ArduPilot reviews carry no maintainer authority. Their purpose is to identify potential code improvements and reduce load on the reviewers who do have merge authority.
Code reviews I've submitted (searchable via this GitHub query) reflect my principles for a good review:
- Explain the rationale behind all comments.
- When raising safety or bug concerns, make them concrete enough for direct evaluation.
- Distinguish matters of correctness (blocking) from matters of opinion (never blocking).