mattswallace

[mattswallace]

Great Answer from:  Hounshell

“Read.

No, really, read.

Read everything about algorithm and design you can possible find. There are phenomenal books out there. The Sedgewick algorithm books are good. The Algorithm Design Manual by Skiena is good as well. Together these books follow me on every bookshelf at every job I go to, along with The Mythical Man-Month.

Then ask.

Talk to people you respect. Ask them what decision points they had and why they made the decisions they did. The good ones will always be able to tell you "I chose to do X because it's better than A, B in these ways. I could have gone with C, but I felt this was a better choice because of this".

Next, do.

Build stuff. Build stuff that you'll never use. Build stuff that you'll never need. Go write a program that solves a Sudoku puzzle. Now go do it again. And again. Build it 5 completely different ways. Build a program that generates Sudoku puzzles and feed it into the solvers. Find which solver is fastest. And then...

Find out why.

The "what" is almost never important. I mean, yeah, it is critical to finishing the project at hand, but at the end if you know the "what" without knowing the "why", then you might as well never done it in the first place. You got a bullet point on your resume. Go get a cookie and congratulate yourself. The "why" is so much more important than the "what".

And for the record Sudoku was an example. I spent a lot of free time going through that exercise with a ton of the logic puzzles on Kongregate and learned a lot on the way.

http://www.amazon.com/Bundle-Algorithms-Parts-1-5-Fundamentals/dp/020172684X/

http://www.amazon.com/Algorithm-Design-Manual-Steven-Skiena/dp/1848000693/

http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-Anniversary/dp/0201835959/

[mattswallace]

I was really excited to see this. This video from an article on Game Spot talks about the coming Clubs feature that I’ve been working on with my team at Riot. Here is the full article talking about a lot of cool things that are coming to League of Legends http://www.gamespot.com/articles/introducing-the-new-league-of-legends/1100-6434200/

[mattswallace]

I've been meaning to try out google cardboard for a while. Here's a great short tutorial on how to get started with unity and the Google cardboard SDK.

[mattswallace]

Would you like to use a “Binding” Framework in swift ? Check this out... Looks pretty cool to me and it’s being actively developed in Swift 2.0 as of this date. 

[mattswallace]

Disney and Code.org have teamed up to offer free online computer science lessons to students around the globe! By learning to code their own Star Wars game through Hour of Code, kids can be proud of the technological treats they construct.

Learn more at code.org/starwars

[mattswallace]

Playing games on the PC is making a comeback by Nick Statt, cnet.com

Video game consoles have long dominated the video game industry, offering a seemingly cheaper and more consistent experience. But not for long.

Playing the Xbox and PlayStation from a living room couch isn't what it used to be.

This week, the…

Really great article about PC gaming. Really proud to see that Riot Games is mentioned because of their contribution to the e-sports in the industry right now.

[mattswallace]

Video that I found that covers how to use Neko / Haxe to create a web service and uses templates to create web pages. Pretty good place to start in case you where wondering how this works.

[mattswallace]

Because the Haxe Language can compile to many different platforms, it is useful in a wide variety of domains. Take a look at who is using Haxe.

[mattswallace]

Am I Weird? Is an app that my company 615 I/O just released. It's a simple and fun way of sharing all the fun and weird things you do that have maybe been somewhat reluctant to post on Facebook or Twitter. So login and let the community vote up your weirdex rating so and be proud of your weirdness!

[mattswallace]

Trying to figure out how I can make this part of my halloween costume this year.

[mattswallace]

Your new favorite MSC framework.

BBMSC is meant to make using the Model / Subscriber / Controller pattern drop dead simple and fun. If you need structure around your code so that you can always rely on your views or "subscribers" to get the data they need and you also want a simple structure that all the developers on the team can standardize on then look no further.

[mattswallace]

I recently started messing around with Ghost. It's a simple blogging platform on top of node.js. You can get an EC2 instance of Ghost running pretty easy. Just login to your AWS Account and then go to the following link. https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00HJDY0DY?sr=0-2

If you are like me, you'll want to deploy using git. Check out the following video. It explains how to set up a local git repo and then push the the server.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-v_DBFbZxo

Please make note that the video doesn't show ghost setup. The hook that you will want to setup will push to /var/www/ghost on the EC2 Ghost instance.

[mattswallace]

Here is the chunk of code from a Stackoverflow post that you should care the most about to get this working. Basically it gets your current location and then uses a string value to search for relevant addresses around you.

- (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; locationManager = [[CLLocationManager alloc] init]; locationManager.delegate = self; [self.searchDisplayController setDelegate:self]; locationManager.distanceFilter = kCLDistanceFilterNone; locationManager.desiredAccuracy = kCLLocationAccuracyBest; [locationManager startUpdatingLocation]; } #pragma mark - LocationUpdating -(void)locationManager:(CLLocationManager *)manager didUpdateLocations:(NSArray *)locations { CLLocation *newLocation = [locations lastObject]; CLLocation *oldLocation; if (locations.count > 1) { oldLocation = [locations objectAtIndex:locations.count-2]; } else { oldLocation = nil; } NSLog(@"didUpdateToLocation %@ from %@", newLocation, oldLocation); MKCoordinateRegion userLocation = MKCoordinateRegionMakeWithDistance(newLocation.coordinate, 1500.00, 1500.00); [self performSearch:userLocation]; } #pragma mark - Search Methods -(void)performSearch:(MKCoordinateRegion)aRegion { // Cancel any previous searches. [localSearch cancel]; [locationManager stopUpdatingLocation]; // Perform a new search. MKLocalSearchRequest *request = [[MKLocalSearchRequest alloc] init]; request.naturalLanguageQuery = @"taxi"; request.region = aRegion; [UIApplication sharedApplication].networkActivityIndicatorVisible = YES; localSearch = [[MKLocalSearch alloc] initWithRequest:request]; [localSearch startWithCompletionHandler:^(MKLocalSearchResponse *response, NSError *error){ [UIApplication sharedApplication].networkActivityIndicatorVisible = NO; if (error != nil) { [[[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"Map Error",nil) message:[error localizedDescription] delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"OK",nil) otherButtonTitles:nil] show]; return; } if ([response.mapItems count] == 0) { [[[UIAlertView alloc] initWithTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"No Results",nil) message:nil delegate:nil cancelButtonTitle:NSLocalizedString(@"OK",nil) otherButtonTitles:nil] show]; return; } results = response; [self.searchDisplayController.searchResultsTableView reloadData]; }]; NSLog(@"DEBUG"); }

[mattswallace]

Learn about programming from scratch, then progress to create detailed code for your projects.

Scripting

Learn about programming from scratch, then progress to create detailed code for your projects.

[mattswallace]

I've been experimenting and learning Unity over the last couple of days. One thing that I wanted to be able to do is use an Xbox 360 controller with my mac. For the life of me I couldn't get the "A" button to work. Well the reason is I'm using the TATTIE BOGLE DRIVER for os x and the button reference that I was using from online videos was not correct if you are using this driver. So I went to the Unity wiki and found the following. 

If you follow this tutorial just use the number 16 for the A button rather than 0.