All of the things labelled as Posts, so that crawlers have a place to find them.
What is the length of a string? A tricky question
Every day millions of programmers require the length of a string. Despite this there is no universal definition of what string.length actually represents. It changes
A pan, zoom, and rotate gesture model for touch devices
No mobile app would be complete without a few gestures. I already had swiping in place, so now I turned my attention to panning, zooming,
Efficient open ended queues with deferred deletion
Queues are a common part of modern software. Scheduling jobs and actions isn’t just for distributed systems, but for any system dealing with external events
The simple things matter – examples of UX failure from Amazon Video
Good products can be hampered by relatively minor design issues. After a long period of development it’s often tempting to push something through the door
How blaming the user leads to tragedy
On 9 February human error resulted in 11 deaths and 80 further casualties in tragic wreck near Bad Aibling, Germany. Despite a supposedly robust safety
API forensics for iOS system time: missing documentation
I started using the mach_absolute_time function on iOS to get proper event timing information. It works well, I think; the problem is that I actually
The trouble with `floor` and `ceil`
floor and ceil have the bad habit of producing unexpected results. They aren’t broken, but in light of floating point nasties can often result in
Implementing a Swipe gesture
I recently implemented a swipe gesture for Fuse. The gesture recognition itself, though complex, was not hard to implement; I had most of the needed
The hard part of error handling is not the error itself
Are our discussions about errors focusing on the right part of the problem? We tend to argue about what exceptions mean, or how return values
Why don’t we have runtime virtual dispatching?
Virtual functions are a great feature, but they have a rather severe limitation. They can only be implemented by extending the definition of all classes
Everything can and will go wrong: all functions fail
In a dreamy programming utopia, functions behave correctly and nothing unexpected ever happens. In technical reality however even the most mundane of actions can suffer
The exceptional myth of non-local flow
“Exceptions are bad because they introduce non-local flow into a program.” It’s an argument I’ve seen often and it even came up in the comments
Messy error handling in Rust with `try!`
I just read the documentation for std::result in Rust. A friend had pointed it out and said it left a sour taste in his mouth,
Adding the first type expression to Leaf: type_infer
I’ve added the ability to type a variable based on an expression. The type_infer type operator resolves to the type of the provided expression —
Defects allowed by imprecise access modifiers
I recently fixed a defect that I felt the compiler could have caught. Some initialization code was not being run as I was calling a
Robot journalist predicts programmers will be obsoleted
Am I, as a programmer, in danger of being obsoleted by a program of my own creation? A recent BBC article gives programmers an 8%
The curse of varargs
Unexpectedly I needed to add support for variable argument functions to Leaf long before I intended to. I just wanted to print out a value,
Reusing existing test suites for new features
Redundancy is one of the biggest sources of problems on any project, especially in tests. Having an unmaintainable test suite is in nobody’s interest. Eliminating
Calculating square root using Newton’s iterative method
I suddenly had a desire to calculate square roots. It’s been one of those things that just sits at the back of my mind lingering.
A real cost of low performing applications
The platform as a service model adds new importance to the performance of our software. Despite ever decreasing hardware costs, metered services make every bit
You can’t trade privacy for security
The idea that one can give up privacy in exchange for security is misguided and dangerous. It’s a cliché peddled by politicians who either just
Essential facts about floating point calculations
Floating point numbers are everywhere. It’s hard to find software that doesn’t use any. For something so essential to writing software you’d think we take
