Balance Programming

Balance Programming

  • ThinMatrix

    This is just a quick one, I recommend checking out the game development channel ThinMatrix. While I’ve been watching he’s worked on: I like the style and feel of these videos. They’re all fairly relaxed. It follows the up and occasional downs of one guys creative and engineering approach. He uses his own engine rather…

  • vcpkg

    It’s best if you can avoid re-inventing the wheel. If someone has already written the code you need then it can save a lot of time. Although you should probably make sure about licences before incorporating it. That could be copy-pasting something off a web page but, especially for bigger bits of code, far better…

  • Blocked

    You might want to be working but sometimes it’s not possible. Let’s think about why it might be and what to do about it. I have a feeling that this post could also be titled “Avoid single point of failure”. Illness People get ill. It’s going to happen sometimes. This is obviously a problem on…

  • Scrum

    I’ve given a brief history of Agile and talked about the Agile Manifesto, those were both research driven. However I can talk about Scrum from personal experience. I’ve been involved with a couple of more tentative uses with a few Scrum ceremonies but also done it properly with the bells and whistles. Overall I enjoyed…

  • Bits and bools

    One of my friends was wondering about the performance difference between large representations of bools, say bytes, and packed representations of bools, individual bits. Accessing a byte is easier, requiring fewer instructions, but is going to fill up your processor’s cache. Accessing a bit is harder, requiring more instructions, but you can fit more in.…

  • Area of a polygon

    I wasn’t planning on a follow up but here we go. You’ve calculated the closest distance between a point and a line and calculated the area of a triangle but now want more, the area of a polygon! Winging it Let’s try to remember our school geometry lessons. You can divide any polygon up into…

  • Home or office?

    For many years I spent most of the year in the office 5 days a week. That was the normal. Most software engineers did the same. My office seemed pretty progressive with a hybrid model. We could work from home Monday and Friday. I was often in the office anyway but it was great to…

  • Area of a triangle

    This is a bit specific but that is the way with some algorithms, or formulas in this case. Let’s say you want to calculate the area of a triangle. I’m not sure why. It could be something in a graphics shader for a fancy effect. Winging it It’s been a long time since high school…

  • Diversion ahead

    I’m not going to be able to spend as much time on the blog for a bit. Rather than struggle to keep up with the schedule I’m going to drop the schedule for now. I hope to still post occasionally but it won’t be every Tuesday and will be less often. It could mean that…

  • Defer again

    I written about defer before. This is a keyword that delays execution of a statement until the end of the block. It’s designed to allow you to perform setup and immediately specify the associated clean up. I thought it made control flow a bit more confusing but could be a useful tool. Simple implementation C++…