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 […]
Genius: an exceptionally intelligent person or one with exceptional skill in a particular area of activity – Oxford English Dictionary, via Bing More than once in my career as a software engineer, I’ve come across organisations that make the bold claim that “we only hire geniuses”, or words to that effect. This always puzzles me […]
So, I’m not a poet, but sometimes, C++ inspires me with its sheer bloody-mindedness: With apologies to Rogers, Hammerstein, Stroustrup, and possibly Julie Andrews… Pointers that point to obscure memory pages Memory management from the dark ages References that don’t reference anything These are C++’s evilest things Templates that keep all my types safe and […]
In the first post of this series of ramblings (er… history lessons from my point of view) I made the statement that “C++ used to be viewed as the cool kids’ language – now it’s what the old guys make the cool kids use as a form of punishment”. I was only partly joking. C++ […]
In my last post, I made some observations about the state of Windows C++ code I’ve encountered recently, having started out in “them days” with 16-bit code, DOS and Windows 3.1. After lamenting the drop in the quality of C++ code in general, I’m coming out and saying it: The Microsoft Windows API I’ve been […]
Well, I’m back after a short hiatus. I know you missed me, but no explanations will be forthcoming, so you’ll have to live with it. But it’s time to write again, and for the past eighteen months or so, I’ve been working on a single Windows C++ project, after leaving Windows development altogether since around […]
A work colleague and I seem to get drawn into long technical discussions of a fairly robust nature on a regular basis (he may read this and he knows who he is). After the first couple of hours, we generally forget where we started, but that doesn’t seem to matter. We have to stop before […]