From C to C++98 to “Modern C++”, memory management ‘best practice’ has been one of the most changeable things in this family of languages. C’s basic memalloc and free functions for allocating and releasing heap memory were replaced with C++’s more sophisticated new and delete keywords, which, in turn, are being supplanted by the so-called […]
It’s pretty hard to do any research in crypto or security and not come across Bruce Schneier’s Schneier on Security blog. He brings a sane and fact-based (not to mention sobering at times) perspective to a field that is often filled with FUD, poor explanations and outright lies. Recently he wrote an excellent essay on […]
This is a great talk from this year’s PyCon AU. The speaker is one of the core developers on the Django project, and he’s talking about some of the ways in which interactive content and code can be executed in web pages (i.e. on the browser side) without coding in JavaScript. Great content, well-presented – […]
YAML, JSON and Config Files Some years ago, one of my very first blog posts was a piece on how terribly XML fails its essential design goals. I mentioned that YAML or JSON were much better compromise solutions to the essential problem of expressing data in a form that is easily readable by both people […]
For those of us migrating from C or pre-2011 C++, the auto keyword in Modern C++ can have us scratching our heads a bit, when we first encounter it. Initially, auto seems to run counter to the generally strong typing philosophy of C++. Declaring variable types has been drilled into us very early on, so […]
So I never wrote that next article on DLLs. It’s five years since I wrote my “Old Man C++” series of blog posts on the changes I’ve observed in the software development world since I ‘came up’ in the mid-90s. I was going to talk about Windows DLLs, and all wonderful and horrific things that […]
Just today, I welcomed a new co-worker to my organisation. Until now, I’ve been the only C++ guy in the place, but this person is also a C++ dev, and will be working with me on a component that I’ve been building since the beginning of the year. So today we’ve been getting to know […]
Sometimes (often) a project doesn’t turn out to be quite what you envisaged. Blogging has been like that for me. As in most situations where you try something new, plans and ideas don’t align with reality. For me and blogging, it was understanding that blog posts don’t all need to be long, researched articles. I […]