Category: General
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Maxims of comments?
Several years ago Tom Scott made a video, The Hidden Rules of Conversation, which introduced me to the cooperative principle. They are the conventions that are generally followed by everyone in order to communicate effectively. I wonder if they can tell us anything about writing comments? Grice’s maxims Paul Grice was writing about the gap…
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Mermaid diagrams
Famously an picture is worth a thousand words. That may or may not be true but a diagram can definitely help explain something. There’s plenty of software and online tools to help with this but, in my experience, making a diagram can still take a lot of time. It’s good to do but if you…
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Forever change
Let’s start with a few updates about the blogs. I’m going to be busier in the coming weeks so, for now, posts will only be once a week. It might be possible to go back to twice a week once things have settled down. We’ll have to see. If you’ve been reading from the start…
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In what order
I came across the Odin language recently. I’ve not done any detailed research yet but I came across a new keyword and it got me thinking. defer The defer keyword goes in front of any statement and delays the execution of that statement until the end of the current scope. A possible use case is…
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The Power of 10
I originally came across the The Power of 10 by watching the video how NASA writes space-proof code. These are a set of rules to produce code that can be reviewed and statically analysed. As they’ve come from the space industry you can understand why they want to be really sure what their code does.…
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Apples vs oranges
In some of my recent reading I’ve been frustrated at authors making poor comparisons. The typical behaviour is to showcase an example of good coding with their preferred language / methodology against an example of bad coding with the competitor. It’s not, say, the language which is making the difference. It’s whether the code has…
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Time complexity
If you’ve had a university education in software engineering you have probably come across algorithmic time complexity. This classifies algorithms by how long they take to run given an known amount of input, normally written using big O notation. Picking an algorithm with a good time complexity can make an enormous difference to the performance…
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The taste test
Imagine you’ve just been given a new cookbook. It has a recipe for Oysters Rockefeller that a friend recommended. Really it could be anything but oysters have been in my media for the last week so we’ll go with them. You buy the ingredients, prepare them carefully, cook and serve. It looks great, you take…
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Searching for design
This Problem Changes Your Perspective On Game Dev looks at game design as though it’s a search algorithm touching on: Jonas Tyroller talks quickly and makes an argument for discovery rather than one off design. While I’m interested in game design are there lessons to be learned beyond that? Is game dev different? Jonas is…
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Less can be more
I was listening to the podcast series Cautionary Tales and their episode Do nothing, Then Do Less. By all means listen to the whole thing but I’d like to highlight the crossover with The Happiness Lab starting 12 minutes 30 in. Bias for adding People are apparently biased towards adding things in order to solve…