When drawing basic primitives we want nice smooth edges. This means both pixel correctness and antialiasing. In my previous article about drawing a rectangle I showed how to use a distance function. […]
Antialiasing with a signed distance field
Get rid of those boolean function parameters
I need to make a quick variation of a function. The calculation, or behaviour, differs slightly on the needs of the caller. I throw in a bool parameter to do this switch. […]
Combining several GL draw calls into one: a rounded rectangle
My previous article explains how I draw a rounded rectangle using a shader instead of tesselation. The biggest remaining issue is using eight calls to draw; one draw call would be much […]
Quickly drawing a rounded rectangle with a GL shader
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 […]
Where the wild code grows
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 […]
Blocking and asynchronous operations without timeout are broken
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 […]
Debugging by binary searching through code revisions
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 […]
A bug, an error, or fault, and the irrelevance of classification
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 […]
A swipingly good time with edge gestures
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, […]
How HTTP cache headers betray your privacy
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 […]
Fast build turnaround time is essential
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 […]
Cohesion and coupling: good measures of quality
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
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 […]
Using a hack, stifling the perfectionist, and moving on
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 […]
