Category: General
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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…
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When to warn
If the software you’re developing has a problem then you want to know about it. We use log messages at runtime, build messages at compile time and we can run extra tools to tell us even more about our code. However there can be so many messages they you don’t end up reading them, at…
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Algorithms are great, minimax
There are problems that are hard to solve. There are problems that are easy to solve if you don’t care about speed. At university the algorithms course was one of my favourites. Finding the right algorithm can mean being able to solve the problem much faster. Maybe you’ll have to discover it yourself but there…
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Benchmarking tool
I’ve written before about when and how to optimise code. I think there are often more important aspects to a project than code performance. Servers, desktops, laptops and even new mobile phones are many times more powerful than an old computer. Instead you need to decide whether the performance is good enough. That could be…
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How often?
Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY) is, ironically, said quite a lot. I think in general this is uncontroversial. If you have a choice between writing a lot of very similar code: Or something smaller that does the same job: You are probably going to choose the later. Maybe you think this is an overly simple example…
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AI assistance
We now have access to new powerful tools like ChatGPT that can help us write code. There are a number of potential issues with this: So far I haven’t found this useful for situations at work. Every time I had asked for some source there were fundamental flaws with the code. It did sometimes give…