37. You have no idea what that number is, do you? A number without context nor a label is a random value. It doesn’t tell us anything. Imagine walking by a billboard, […]
Stop waving the wand of magic numbers
How I use `variant` in the Leaf compiler
Variants are data types that can store different types of values in them, as opposed to one fixed type. In contrast to a generic object or an untyped variable, there is a […]
Dissecting my Rusty Superhero Bots — The code review
I chose Rust as the language for the Botters of the Galaxy contest. My code structure was suitable enough to get me to the final league, but I had a few […]
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 synchronous callback in loop defect
A bug snuck by me while adding a new feature to Each: a behaviour in Fuse that dynamically adds UI elements. I had to change a lot of the code, so I […]
Embedding a text file in C++ code (with Scons)
I needed a way to embed a text file in my C++ code. I recently introduced Leaf code into the Leaf compiler and didn’t want to depend on a file dependency at […]
Yummy UI food with keyframe animations
When I saw the below demo I thought “neat, how’d they do that”? That may sound surprising if you knew that I wrote the API for this. In this article I’ll describe […]
Calculating pleasant stepping values for a chart
I needed pleasant range values for the charting API in Fuse. These are the values written by the ticks on the plot, typically on the Y-axis. In the interest of simplicity it […]
A game of what’d they press? Hit testing in a 2d/3d layout
A simple tap of the screen invokes a staggering amount of calculations. That screen is actually big tree of UI elements, and we need to navigate it quickly to find the right […]
Stuffing curves into boxes: calculating the bounds
Now that we’ve drawn beziers and arcs there’s only one piece missing in the vector API. We need to calculate the bounds of the curve: the minimum/maximum points where it will draw. […]
Rendering an SVG elliptical arc as bezier curves
I needed to draw ellipses and arcs. A vector API just wouldn’t be complete without them. Though opinions seem to differ as Apple’s Core Graphics lacks anything but an axis aligned circular […]
The smooth sexy curves of a bezier spline
I’ve been dreaming and coding curves lately. They play an integral role in a vector drawing API, which I’m writing for Fuse now. “Bezier curves” are so common we might think it’s […]
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, and rotation. These nicely round out of […]
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 or asynchronous processing. It’s easy to grab […]
