Write code good enough to deploy rockets

The speaker discusses NASA's "Power of Ten" rules, a set of ten guidelines for writing secure and safe C code, published by NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in 2006. These rules, which are applicable to any programming language, emphasize simplicity, predictability, and defensive programming. Key rules include restricting code to simple control flow, ensuring all loops have compile-time verifiable limits, avoiding dynamic memory allocation after initialization, limiting function length to about 60 lines, performing defensive checks with assert statements, declaring data objects at the smallest possible scope, checking all function return values and parameters, avoiding C macros, restricting the use of pointers, and compiling with all warnings enabled and fixed. The speaker highlights how these practices, exemplified by the Mars rover's state machine architecture, contribute to building robust and traceable systems.