Programming

When I write software, I like to thing of myself to be a craftsman. Taking the time and patience to write clean, logical and hopefully bug free code. In my spare time I like to make things with wood, metal and electronics. Whilst learning this second skillset I have learnt a lot that I believe we could be carrying into writing software. First thing is be patient, we are lucky to make things that have such a quick turn around from concept to prototype, it could be as simple as creating one file and hitting that run button.

A few days ago I stumbled upon a post somewhere that said about starting a log book for work so they could see where their time had been spent. I thought this was a neat idea so I took to starting my own. Problem is that even though a text or markdown file would have more than sufficed, I took this as an oportunity to learn some LaTeX. After an evening or so’s fiddling about, I am proud to show you the template for my logbook (which could easily be adapted into a diary):

Last Monday marked the first time I’ve done any real public speaking outside of the classroom. I was demoing a project that I’ve been working on this past month or two, a Scrum Management tool that enforces strict rules to help teams accomplish their goals. The event was a really nice atmosphere and I loved presenting. Hopefully in the coming months and events I will be able to show off some of my more fun projects like the telemetrics on my in progress robot or my phone app for sharing the clip board.

I recently updated my Ember CLI to version 2.13.2 and started a new project. I was greeted with erros because babel-lint wasn’t configured, firstly it was build errors that I cannot remember (or reproduce at the moment).But I was also getting linting errors because import is a reserved word, obviously this was obfusticating any actual errors from being displayed. I added this file to the root directory of my project and since then I’ve not had any issues with it, even when creating new projects.

First off a quite update. I got two days into writing a new post every night and then had a small family emergency on the third night in so I put a temporary hold on them. I am starting them back up again now. Now for the fun bit. Problem Solving. This post is not all about the process of problem solving and the processes you can apply, it’s more about just using your brain.

I’ve been using Atom since way back in the Beta mainly as an alternative to Sublime Text because I didn’t get on with the way Sublime handles packages and add ins. I have used Atom to write a lot of different languages: C#, C, C++, javascript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Erlang and LISP to name a few. Atom handled all of the language formatting plugins without blinking. A while ago I wrote an Erlang UDP Server with SFML and C++ as a UDP client.

First off, sorry for the post being a day late! I've been swamped with work and a lot of personal stuff. I hope this post can be of use to some of you though! Lately, I have been writing small phone apps that do some fairly useful stuff for me. Like keeping a track on my long term injury pain and other stuff of that nature. The use these apps I've been using Ember CLI and Cordova for my technology stack.

This weeks post is a short one due to time constraints. This is going to be a bit of a brain dump on things that are in my head at the moment. I need to put some time into researching standards for exception handling. In C# I have seen many different ways to handle exceptions, some good, some not so good. I have also been introduced to the Erlang philosophy of let it crash.

Introduction This week I’ve decided to see how well an Erlang UDP Server plays with other languages such as C++. This is to test a current theory of mine which is that Erlang could be used to create a great server for a multiplayer game.  My theory is based on Erlang’s concurrent nature and its past in telecoms and uptime. The language was designed to handle millions of concurrent users/processes so it should be more than equipped for a small multiplayer game.

EmberJS is a front end javascript framework for writing single page web applications. It follows an MVC programming pattern. It is very similar to AngularJS and other similar frameworks. One thing I believe sets EmberJS apart from the alternatives is the Ember-CLI project. Ember CLI is exactly what is says on the tin; a Command Line Interface for Ember applications. It has a lot of fantastic features such as: app folder structure, naming conventions, dependency management, continuous compiling and unit testing.