The problem that I am writing about today is that of reducing the time to cycle through this loop, specifically when you are coding in C++:
- Edit
- Compile
- Run
- GOTO 1
… and ideally, reduce it to zero when it matters.
Flying Low
StandardThis week’s post is inspired by conversations with my friend @rdelcueto and by watching the excellent Jeff and Casey show on Youtube.
Being close to the machine is a very desirable property for platforms. It is not unique to C and C++. Lisp had it in the 80s. It still has it now but nobody uses Lisp unless it is Clojure.
The urban dictionary defines “Flying Low” as a euphemism for having your zipper down, but that’s not what I have in mind.
A platform that flies low is a platform that keeps the distance between the programmer and the CPU short.
A formal-esque definition:
Flying low is the property of having a small number of easily understandable layers of abstraction between the platform and the machine.
Devlog: Porting to iOS
StandardFoundation and Empire
StandardThis week I will cheat by cross-posting a book review of ‘Foundation and Empire’: the second, in publication order, of the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov. I wanted to write a technical post this weekend but a family commitment did not leave me time to write.
Go Profile Yourself
StandardLast month I read, along with every coder on twitter, the “Smart guy productivity pitfalls” article. I then proceeded to watch Randy Pausch’s time management talk. (Links at the bottom.. Can you believe Randy Pausch died almost 5 years ago?)
It is a talk about time management, and in this talk, Randy asks us to wait a month and then write about how our life has changed. Here I am, a bit over a month later, writing about it. Here is what I learned and why I think it will benefit you too:
If you are not measuring where your time is going. You are wasting time.
New challenge: One post a week.
StandardI love writing. I keep a journal where I put my hopes and dreams. I consider my Facebook statuses works of art. I actually enjoy commenting my code.
Last year while I was living in the Bay Area I kept an email list to keep in touch with family members in Mexico, it was very much a blog in email form. I stopped the emails when my life stopped being interesting enough to keep the emails flowing.
Recently I have been keeping a list of ideas worth writing about. And I think that at this point I have buffered enough of them to start the challenge of blogging once a week.
I have a couple of ground rules:
Sergio’s rules of blogging:
- Unless you are Richard Feynman, nobody cares about your biography. 99% of personal posts are boring for everyone except for the writer.
- I will write the blog that I would like to read, so topics will be varied. Mostly programming, but I might blog about other interests of mine.
- I write in English and I tweet in English because English is the lingua franca of programming and programming is most of my life. English is not my first language, apologies in advance.
- I will contradict myself. I apologize in advance.
- Blogs contain opinions. There will be no IMO, IMHO or any other reminder that these are my opinions. The bloggers I admire the most always state their opinions as facts. It makes their writing much stronger.
That’s it… I’ll get to the first post as soon as I pick an idea from my buffer.
Style choices, update
StandardI haven’t written in more than 6 months!
Blobeler, my mesh generator / toy / maybe-game is not dead. In fact it is currently on the stretch to port it to the first target platform: iOS
I haven’t been working non-stop… In fact, I took a couple of months off, according to the stats on my private github repo. I played a lot of guitar from November to January…
Here is a picture of the current state:
