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  Coding tricks of game developers

If you've got any real world programming experience then no doubt at some point you've had to resort to some quick and dirty fix to get a problem solved or a feature implemented while a deadline loomed large. Game developers often experience a horrific "crunch" (also known as a "death march"), which happens in the last few months of a project leading up to the game's release date. Failing to meet the deadline can often mean the project gets cancelled or even worse, you lose your job. So w...

   Tricks,Advice,Gamedesign,Plan     2012-02-12 04:50:30

  Translating math into code with examples in Java, Racket, Haskell and Python

Discrete mathematical structures form the foundation of computer science.These structures are so universal that most research papers in the theory of computation, programming languages and formal methods present concepts in terms of discrete mathematics rather than code.The underlying assumption is that the reader will know how to translate these structures into a faithful implementation as a working program.A lack of material explaining this translation frustrates outsiders.What deepens that fr...

   Math,Algorithms,Formula,Program,Python     2011-11-14 08:43:15

  From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran

Editor’s note: Pedram Keyani has been an engineer at Facebook since 2007. He is a manager on the Site Integrity team, the inventor of Keg Presence and a Hackathon enthusiast. Looking for internships and jobs after college can be exhilarating, especially for people with engineering and other technical expertise. In an otherwise tough job market, demand for software engineers is higher than ever right now. You may find that companies are actually competing to pay you for the knowledge y...

   Career,College,Silicon valley,Transition,Experience     2012-02-20 05:34:24

  Small team? Fix your life with a non-virtual assistant

Like many others, I tried “outsourcing my life” using a digital assistant. A year and a thousand bucks later, I’ve received one department store recommendation and an admittedly adequate spreadsheet of competitive research.I have since cancelled. Why didn’t it work for me?I think I just didn’t trust it/them/him/her (that I even have this ambiguity is indicative of the issues).Most of my mindless time-sinks involve at least a credit card number and are often a con...

   Work,Assistant,Team,Small,Individual,Get an assistant     2011-10-28 10:26:36

  What's Wrong with the For Loop

Closures in Java are a hot topic of late. A few really smart people are drafting a proposal to add closures to a future version of the language. However, the proposed syntax and the linguistic addition are getting a lot of push back from many Java programmers. Today, Elliotte Rusty Harold posted his doubts about the merits of closures in Java. Specifically, he asks "Why Hate the for Loop?": I don’t know what it is some people have against for loops that they’re so eager to...

   For loop,Basic,Problem,Efficiency,Java     2012-02-24 05:06:15

  Handling Plugins In PHP

A common problem that developers face when building applications is how to allow the application to be "plug-able" at runtime.  Meaning, to allow non-core code to modify the way an application is processed at runtime.  There are a lot of different ways that this can be done, and lots of examples of it in real life.  Over a year ago, I wrote a StackOverflow Answer on this topic.  However, I think it deserves another look.  So let's look at some patterns and common im...

   PHP,Plugin,Handling     2012-03-11 13:18:39

  Obviously Correct

What do automatic memory management, static types and purity have in common? They are methods which take advantage of the fact that we can make programs obviously correct (for some partial definition of correctness) upon visual inspection. Code using automatic memory management is obviously correct for a class of memory bugs. Code using static types is obviously correct for a class of type bugs. Code using purity (no mutable references or side effects) isobviously c...

   Memory management,Code,Static,Purity     2011-11-07 08:13:05

  Introducing JavaScript native file management

TL;DR The Mozilla Platform keeps improving: JavaScript native file management is an undergoing work to provide a high-performance JavaScript-friendly API to manipulate the file system. The Mozilla Platform, JavaScript and Files The Mozilla Platform is the application development framework behind Firefox, Thunderbird, Instantbird, Camino, Songbird and a number of other applications. While the performance-critical components of the Mozilla Platform are developed in C/C++, an increasing number o...

   JavaScript,File,Local file,Firfox,Mozilla     2011-12-06 09:05:48

  The Problem With Client-Side Analytics

Client-side analytics is broken. The numbers produced by it are trivially spoofable by competitors and nefarious characters. Most websites use client-side analytics of one type or another and the only way to get numbers you can trust is to compare numbers from multiple providers and to take an average of the closest two.This post highlights the problem and proposes a partial solution that substantially mitigates the issues with minimal effort. Our proposed solution is simply to include a digital...

   Client side,Analysis,Problem,Tricks,ASP.NET,spoof     2011-10-22 12:58:51

  Vim: revisited

I’ve had an off/on relationship with Vim for the past many years. Before, I never felt like we understood each other properly. Vim is almost useless without plugins and some essential settings in .vimrc, but fiddling with all the knobs and installing all the plugins that I thought I needed was a process that in the end stretched out from few hours to weeks, months even; and it the end it just caused frustration instead of making me a happier coder. Recently, I decided to give Vim ano...

   Linux,Editor,Vim,Setup,Quick guideline     2011-12-12 07:55:27