Saturday, September 28, 2013 – 8:27 PM
It’s been a great few weeks since starting at Tier 3. I spent two weeks at the Tier 3 Hack House in Utah. Spent two weeks hanging out with the fantastic Tier 3 engineering team and doing a bit of riding at the same time.
I got back in time to give two talks at my favorite local conference, Seattle Code Camp. I only made it for half the day but met up with several old friends and had some great conversations with some of the attendees. Good times!
Here are the slide decks, source code and other resources for the talks I gave at this year’s Seattle Code Camp.
If anyone found or picked up my Apple Thunderbolt to VGA adaptor I’ve love to get it back. You can contact me or the Code Camp organizers. There’s a six pack in it for you.
Not Your Mother’s C++
More and more apps are build for phones and tablets with less powerful processors and limited battery life. If you want to develop for these devices then it’s important to consider performance when building apps that users will love. C++ has a reputation for been hard to read, let alone write. You paid for the performance C++ gave you with late nights chasing memory leaks and crashes. C++ has moved on in the last few years with new language features, libraries and programming idioms. These all make many of the pitfalls of C++ much easier to avoid. This talk will give an overview of the new features in C++11. Including; how to not worry about memory management (too much), use libraries for graphics, math and data structures, and build apps in a few hundred lines of readable code.
Resources
You can download the code samples. Eventually I’ll get them up on GitHub but right now it’s just a zip file. The samples assume that Cinder is installed in yC:\Src\Download\cinder. If you install it somewhere else you will need to modify the project settings.
- Cinder – The graphics library I used for the GUI in the Life app.
- Boost – A popular library that implements lots of useful features. I used this to implement file access in the Life app.
- Standard Library (STL) – Part of the C++ standard.
The C++11 standard is relatively new, so most compilers don’t support 100% of the standard. C++11 compiler support shootout: Visual Studio, GCC, Clang, Intel gives an overview of which compilers support which features. VS 2013 adds more support for C++11.
You can find videos of sessions from Going Native 2013 online.
Scott Meyer’s books and overview of C++11 are all well worth reading. When I returned to C++ these were the books that got me started.
Someone asked me about game programming books after the talk. Here’s the one I’v been reading Introduction to 3D Game Programming with DirectX 11.
Writing for Developers
Maybe you want to write a programming book, maybe just a blog post or some documentation for your team or the users of an open source project. All the great code you wrote is no good if no one else can understand and use it. Learn about the beginning, middle and end of writing anything and what it takes to write great sample code to go along with all those words.
Resources
On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft by Stephen King was one of the books I wrote when I started writing. Obviously it’s mostly focused on fictional writing but I still found it very valuable.
The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White is the gold standard when it comes to general questions of writing style.
Links to books on MSDN:
Parallel Programming with Microsoft .NET
Parallel Programming with Microsoft Visual C++
You can also find these books on Amazon along with my book on C++ AMP.
C++ AMP: Accelerated Massive Parallelism with Microsoft® Visual C++
Tags: C++, C++AMP, Coding, Events
Comments Off on Seattle Code Camp 2013