
Rectangles appear everywhere in user interfaces, from the backgrounds of elements to rounded border decorations. It’s helpful to be able to draw these fast. I set out to draw a rectangle with […]
Over 20 years of programming. From video games to communications; science to finance; compilers to business processes. Too many languages to even track anymore.
Here's looking to another 20 years towards mastery of the craft.
Rectangles appear everywhere in user interfaces, from the backgrounds of elements to rounded border decorations. It’s helpful to be able to draw these fast. I set out to draw a rectangle with […]
Sometimes I just like to sit back and code something. Free from deadlines. Free from requirements. Free from issue systems and planning teams. It’s so liberating to free ourselves from the shackles […]
Any time we are waiting for something to happen, from reading the disk to locking a mutex, we need to have a timeout. Without a timeout we run the risk of that […]
What do you do when all normal debugging means fail? You can reproduce a bug, but the debugger just doesn’t seem to pinpoint it. Print statements have helped narrow it down, but […]
There’s a lot of confusion about how to classify software issues. Is something a programmer error, or is it an design defect? Is a misbehaviour a failure or is it an unsupported […]
I’ve been working a lot lately on gestures and am currently working on a swipe-in panel class. Mostly we take these controls and behaviours for granted. When I started looking closely however, […]
I recently implemented Etag caching support only to learn its a privacy breach. Internet scum have coopted yet another technology to track us as we browse. In this article I’ll look briefly […]
Being able to make a code change and quickly see the result is critical. The longer we have to wait, the more code quality suffers, and the more productivity drops. Though often […]
What is good code? Even if I say nobody cares about your code the quality nonetheless does influence a project. Functional correctness reigns supreme, but if we put that aside what should […]
Nobody cares about your code. It was quite a shocking moment when I learned this in my programming career. I would take great care in polishing my code only to find out […]
The code works, but it smells funny. A simple if statement makes the bug go away, but we know somehow we’re just masking a bigger problem. Should we take the time to […]
Any interface involving touch will inevitably need to know how fast the user is moving their finger. They touch the screen, drag their finger, release and expect motion to continue at that […]
Complexity is sometimes portrayed as a corner stone to the theory of computation. What good would algorithm analysis be if we had no way to communicate our results? Theory has a role […]
In the world of parametric programming our languages often seem quite varied and unique. At the core however are two primary approaches, let’s call them templates and generics. In this article I’ll […]