I made it to the top Legendary League in a bot programming contest. This is the first such competition I’ve done, with a language, Rust, which I barely know, and all while […]
Dissecting my Rusty Superhero Bots — A contest post-mortem
mortoray
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.
UI Layout: Natural versus dependent size
Elements have either a natural size, a dependent size, or combination of the two. The size of an element influences its placement. The user and creator of a UI layout system must […]
Drawing a bitmap in the window (Leaf-SDL #2)
Read Update #1 Syntax Error I addressed two problems since last update: A bad error message, and an image loading error. The bad error message was triggered when an unknown symbol […]
Fixing some vector drawing issues
I fixed several issues with the vector drawing in Fuse. A few of them seemed somewhat obvious, so as with all such issues, I wonder why they were even there. In this […]
New Game: A quest for graphics (Leaf-SDL #1)
I’ve started a journey to make Leaf more visual. You may have seen some of my videos about complexity, complete with shaky mouse drawn lines. It’s simply not good enough, especially […]
Innocent growth of technical debt
I’ve spent the last several days unravelling the mystery of the Each feature in Fuse. It’s a powerhouse feature that has managed to accumulate a fair share of technical debt. Though in […]
Debugging a defect with a shared argument
While writing some error handling helpers, during my algorithm stream, I encountered a defect. It’s a tricky one dealing with the passing of shared arguments to functions in Leaf. After a lot […]
Should function arguments be reassignable or mutable?
Working on a defect in Leaf I had a question: should function arguments be reassignable within a function? Are they just like local variables, or should they be treated specially? It would […]
Interview Question: A two-player card game
I’ve been asking interviewees, over at interviewing.io, to write a simulation of a two-player card game. It’s an engaging question, revealing a lot about their abilities. It doesn’t involve any trickery nor […]
Are global variables bad?
We hear it often, “global variables are bad, avoid using them!” But is this actually good advice? Simplified blanket statements are already a bit suspicious, but if we get into the details […]
What is a closure?
You’ve heard the term, you’ve probably even used them, but what exactly is a closure? It’s a combination of data and code that have become a staple of modern programming. They offer […]
Hidden complexity in cute animal pictures
You head over to your favourite link site and click one of the pictures — or let’s be honest, you ctrl+click all the pictures. Your browser is filled with tabs of cute […]
Adding += and friends to Leaf
Yesterday I finished a rather simple Kata from Codewars: the sum of a sequence of numbers. It was straight forward to implement, but I felt like it was missing something. It looked […]
Why I’m not a fan of pair programming
Pair programming feels like a lingering ghost. Its adherents proclaim it to be the best approach to coding while the rest of us just continue to ignore it. I’ve only tried it […]
