I wanted to come up with a shattered glass effect for my game. That didn’t quite work as intended, but I was nonetheless happy with the result. In this article I’ll describe […]
Cubist artwork with the help of a GPU
An unpleasant visit from the refactoring demon
In the middle of a major change to the Leaf type system I encountered the refactoring demon. It reared it’s ugly little head chanting, “you’re doing it wrong, all wrong!” It was […]
What a compiler does: symbol resolution
A key activity of a compiler is to translate named symbols into memory locations. The process typically involves a few stages: identifying the symbols, segmenting them, and determining the actual address. In […]
A secure and private browser sandbox
A patchwork set of standards and rules is creating an unsafe web. Cross-site attacks are too common and privacy leaks have become the norm. There’s no reason it has to be like […]
Blocking JavaScript seems like a good idea
My fancy new website is broken due to a script blocking extension. I found this out when I showed a friend the Radial Blitz website. He complained that something was lacking. He […]
Using macros to simplify type visitors and enums
I like using enums and type hierarchies. What I don’t like is writing verbose switch statements to use them. In C++ I use macros to significantly reduce the burden of creating visitors. […]
What is an idempotent function?
Idempotence is an essential tool in programming. It has many uses, from improving fault tolerance, clarifying code, to writing declarative deployment scripts. It’s important to understand what idempotent means. There are a […]
What is amortized time?
Amortized time is often used when stating algorithm complexity. Instead of giving values for worst-case performance it provides an average performance. This is appropriate in many domains, but we must be careful. […]
Visiting nodes in a recursive data type with traversal contexts
Iterating over the elements of a recursive data structure can be difficult. Given a set of objects, where each object could potentially link to any other object, how do we visit each […]
The false abstraction antipattern
Useless interfaces, factories, and other abstractions are everywhere. They are the result of trying to prematurely generalize code. In a recent article I wrote about how I removed one from Leaf. It […]
Counterargument: Don’t put logic in tests
I consider test suites to be first class code. They need to be clean, adaptable, and frequently refactored just like the primary code. Thus I was quite bothered to see the article […]
Why more eyes are helpful: time wasted on a simple bug
I spent several hours trying to fix a defect that didn’t exist. I’m working on template methods in Leaf and one of my overloads wasn’t resolving. As it is a new feature […]
Why social media needs to manipulate you
Has Facebook really done something deviant with their emotional feed experiment? Sure, it is despicable and unethical, but it wasn’t truly different from what is done on social sites every day. The […]
A curious non-OOP virtual inheritance for a GPU
A new technology I’m trying has a curious domain-specific extension for OpenGL graphics. It introduces a block concept allowing for modular shader code. From a language standpoint I was uncertain what to […]
