I work for a big games company as a senior programmer, and I’m a regular on the interview loop. While I’d love to hire candidates who are smart and get things done, the reality of the situation is that more often than not I also have to hire candidates with experience. They have to be… Continue reading “Smart and Gets Things Done”?
Category: Programming
Lisping towards enlightenment
Me: a C/C++ programmer of 12 years (professionally), a Lisp dabbler (programmer is too strong a word to use here) of, let’s say ~3 months. I’ve done enough functional stuff to be comfortable with that side, but I haven’t (hadn’t) yet written a project big enough to get me used to Lisp syntax. The project:… Continue reading Lisping towards enlightenment
Six languages worth knowing
“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing” – Alan Perlis. I’ve thought about this, and developed a short list of languages worth knowing. Not-so-coincidentally, each language in my list embodies a distinct computational model. In no particular order: The ALGOL family. C and its descendants. This is… Continue reading Six languages worth knowing
Webular lisp
I’ve decided to pick up the reins of lisp again and see if I can’t make some lispy web goodness. So to that end, I installed apache2, mod_lisp2, and did an asdf-install of cl-modlisp tonight. It seems to be correctly installed: next step is to go back to Practical Common Lisp et al and refresh… Continue reading Webular lisp
Books I keep at work
The working bookshelf of a games programmer.
Exploring Pascal’s Triangle
Pascal’s Triangle (henceforth known as PT). You know – that thing you learned in maths. The Wikipedia entry, like most mathematical Wikipedia entries, reads (if your mathematical background is anything like mine) like “here’s a few things you might vaguely remember from school, oh and of course gleep = glorp”. Although I have to say,… Continue reading Exploring Pascal’s Triangle
Concurrency in games
I’ve been programming next-gen consoles for a while now, and I have to say: it’s not getting any easier to write games to take advantage of multi-core systems. The conventional wisdom at my company is: writing multithreaded code is hard, so “ordinary programmers” should not be doing it – let’s leave it to the senior… Continue reading Concurrency in games
The Camel Has Two Humps
I’ve just been reading an interesting paper on teaching programming. First, the data regarding rates of attrition on computing courses is startling. Between 30% and 60% of the total CS intake fails the very first programming course! The paper’s authors postulate 3 programming hurdles to be negotiated: sequencing and assignment iteration and recursion concurrency Surely… Continue reading The Camel Has Two Humps
RotateAVI updated
The latest version has a minor update. Nothing functional, just a display thing. But every little thing makes it a bit easier to use. Rotate AVI files from your digital camera easily!
fighting the code
Why doesn’t automake/autoconf properly recognise the way to use Flex/Bison with C++ scanner/parser generation? I use a .ll file and it thinks the output is going to be a .c instead of a .cc. Likewise I use a .yy file and it screws up the includes in my bison output because it decides to go… Continue reading fighting the code