All Posts

  • Assembly as a First Programming Language

    Programming languages, just as spoken language, are constantly evolving. They have come a long way since the era of punch cards and assembly language. We have low level languages, and high level languages. There’s functional languages and object-oriented languages. There are programming languages created specifically for code golfing, and there are joke programming languages such…

  • The Plight of the Prompt Engineers

    The year is 2030, and programming as we know it has been transformed by artificial intelligence. Gone are the days of writing lines of code by hand, debugging errors, and testing software. Instead, programmers have become prompt engineers, who use natural language to instruct AI systems to generate code for them. Prompt engineering may sound…

  • A Better Way to Search on GitHub

    Let’s be real, searching on GitHub sucks big time. Or at least it did, until they built in a shortcut to launch Visual Studio Code in your browser. That’s right. Next time you’re browsing a repository on GitHub and want to search for something, load up VS Code by clicking on the . (dot) button.…

  • A Self-Help Book? Try a Blog Post

    The market nowadays is rife with self-help books, as can be confirmed by having a glance at any bookstore online. There are books that promise to teach you how to become happy. Other books set out to make you successful. You get the drill. Whether it’s about learning good habits, developing a thick skin, improving…

  • In the Name of Security

    Lately we’ve been hearing so much about the whole Apple in-app purchases take ordeal, that it’s become tiring. It has become impossible to have a sane, logical discussion on the topic, too. And I suppose that is what has made this topic that much more exhausting. Apple takes a 15% cut from the earnings of…

  • Creating a Memory Allocator for Fun

    Lately I’ve been reading the well known Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces book. It is one of the best operating systems books available, so it goes without saying that the book is very much worth reading – and it’s even available for free, though you should probably buy it if you can. A nice part…

  • Searching is a Skill

    Being the tech savvy member of the family comes with a price, as you might know. Whether it is fixing a formatting issue in a Word document, finding out why the sound is not coming out, or simply rotating a picture 90º degrees counter clockwise, family members will always look to you when it comes…

  • Ruby is Wild

    Ruby sometimes feels like the grumpy parent that gives in to a child’s demands, after they’ve thrown a tantrum. In this case the child represents us, programmers. Though if you look at it more carefully, you’ll find that, in fact, Ruby is a language that respects the programmer. That explains why there are so many…

  • Reclaiming Some CPU Cycles From Apple

    There I was, on a cloudy Saturday, working on a command-line tool for fun and no profit. As I went through the compile and run cycles, I became more and more frustrated at the time it took to run the newly compiled binary. This issue is also described in a post I ran into some…

  • Life and Death

    The very foundations of our existence. Joy and pain. Laughter and crying. To be and then to not be. When people are born, they often bring joy to those close to them. A responsibility; one more mouth to feed; one more person to worry about; one more reason to lose sleep. Yet, if you ask…