I suddenly had a desire to calculate square roots. It’s been one of those things that just sits at the back of my mind lingering. I knew roughly that an iterative method […]
Calculating square root using Newton’s iterative method
A real cost of low performing applications
The platform as a service model adds new importance to the performance of our software. Despite ever decreasing hardware costs, metered services make every bit count. My previous article on performance touched […]
You can’t trade privacy for security
The idea that one can give up privacy in exchange for security is misguided and dangerous. It’s a cliché peddled by politicians who either just don’t understand or are intentionally misleading the […]
Essential facts about floating point calculations
Floating point numbers are everywhere. It’s hard to find software that doesn’t use any. For something so essential to writing software you’d think we take great care in working with them. But […]
Be a good mentor, not a dickhead
I’ve worked with a lot of people of varying skill levels, from superstar programmers to not-sure-how-they-got-the-job types. Integrating and working with new people is always a daunting task. For great people, it’s […]
Antialiasing with a signed distance field
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. […]
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, […]
