Tag: tools
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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…
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Calling functions
I was recently talking about clang-tidy. One of the performance checks it can run is unnecessary-value-param. This makes sense, accidentally passing a big array by value rather than by reference can invisibly ruin the code performance. The rule was pretty easy though, pass simple types by value and everything else by reference. Then along came…
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Saving pennies
Imagine your shopping at a different supermarket from normal. You notice that baked beans are 3p per tin cheaper than you’re use to. The news had a story about supermarket price wars on basic goods recently. It’s a bit out of your way but if you switch supermarkets you could save money on beans each…
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PowerPoint misfit
I’m not a PowerPoint expert. I occasionally have to do presentation to colleagues but it’s not a regular part of my job. The discovery of a markdown to PowerPoint converters I’m probably going to use the PowerPoint editor even less. I normally most interested in the information, a bit of text and a few bullet…
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Dream formatter
I have my own preferences about formatting code. Some developers do but I’ve met others who don’t care and just want to get on with the code. On a team you’re dealing with other developers who will have their own ideas about this. How does that work? Do you each do your own thing? Do…
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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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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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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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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…
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Markdown to PowerPoint
When you writing documentation for your project Markdown lets you concentrate on the words rather than complicated formatting. You can take the same approach with PowerPoint. There are multiple tools out there which will do this. I’ve used marp and it makes very easy to make a presentation quickly. If presentations are a big part…