Month: December 2015

I have nothing but respect for game developers. What they create are nothing short of technical feats and they tend to work with anemic budgets.

If you think a second is fast, bear in mind the benchmark to reach in game development is processing and rendering sixty times a second! To put this in perspective, most websites are unable to process and render sixty times a second despite doing far less work.

 

How do game developers accomplish these awesome feats? They gain a working knowledge of the environments their games run in and figure out how to take advantage of it to accomplish their goals.

More practically, they identify what makes it impossible for their code to reliably run sixty times a second. The source of the limitation is labeled expensive and they use their knowledge of the environment to create clever ways to workarounds.

As web developers we can learn a lot from this practice. We need to understand what keeps our websites from running smoothly and work around them.

Continue reading Expensive

The single biggest improvement you can make to any piece of code is to make it simpler to understand.

Continue reading Optimize Your Code for Clarity

Society tends to think little of rappers. Very rarely do their lyrics go beyond a certain range of topics. As Biggie Smalls once (or twice) put it: “money, hoes and clothes, blunt smoke coming out the nose is all a nigga knows“.

Despite the unflattering depiction, I feel these are individuals start-ups need to embrace as role-models. Not because Ben Horowitz loves raps and writes big cheques to start-ups. Not because rappers can get your whole team to actually come into the office. It’s a lot simpler and more important than all that:

There is no rapper who isn’t about making money.

Continue reading Why Rappers Are Smarter than Startups

Writing code seems really easy from the outside looking in. You sit at a computer all day and get paid for it.

In a lot of minds, it’s about showing up. Sit in front of the computer and the code will flow. The longer you’re there, the more code you get. The more code the better.

Having more bags of cements doesn’t guarantee a better building. Having more salt doesn’t guarantee a better meal.

While it’s important to the final product, time spent writing code just an ingredient like any other.

The knowledge on effectively using it is critical to getting the best possible results.

Continue reading Tips For Making Better Software