Coding Challenge Postmortem And Analysis: Tetris in 8 Hours

You may have seen that yesterday I coded Tetris from scratch in 8 hours in C++ (source code and EXE links on that page). Today I shall reflect on the whys, the good and bad points and lessons learned.

Coding Challenge: Write Tetris In 8 Hours or Less

UPDATE (next day): You can read the postmortem report here!

Can I write the entire game of Tetris in 8 hours or less using my Simple2D wrapper library? Let’s find out. I’ll update this blog as I go!

Installing Simple2D and Compiling your first application

Simple2D is my graphics library for students and beginners looking to experiment with drawing 2D graphics in C++ in the simplest possible way. It is based on the Direct2D API but removes almost all of the complexity. This article contains instructions on installing the software and all of the extras it requires, and shows how to compile your first program using Simple2D.

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Learn To Program 2: Ground Rules

So you’ve decided you want to learn computer programming. That’s great! Now what?

I’m not going to start teaching you to write programs in this article; instead I’m going to give pointers and topics for thought that apply equally to all beginning coders.

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Complete archive of old programming and science posts now available

All the posts from the original djkaty.com blog are now online!

Sadly, the last part of Scale of The Universe and Our Closest Neighbours was “lost in translation”, but more or less everything else has been recovered.

If you missed them first time around, some reader favourites were:

Science – Scale of The Universe and Our Closest Neighbours

Bluetooth – Bluetooth A2DP headphones (high quality stereo), Windows Vista and cellphones

Filesystems – NTFS Bad Sectors Resolution: The $BadClus Metafile

Web services – Automatic WSDL Generation in PHP 5

There’s plenty more – just check the Bluetooth, Book Reviews, Filesystems, IT Industry, Operating Systems, Programming, Recommended Documentaries, Science and Software category tabs in the right-hand pane for the rest of the archives.

Enjoy!

AJAX JavaScript Control (2012 Update)

AJAX Control lets you quickly embed AJAX controls using text, XML and XSLT in a variety of ways to your web pages.

Complete Gaming Journalism archive now available

Hi everyone!

The complete archive of articles from my time writing for TheSixthAxis is now online. This includes previously unpublished articles, and uncensored/unedited versions of existing articles.

In the Reviews and First Impressions sections you can find serious and professionally-written reviews and early impressions of various video games that I was tasked to investigate.

In Blog & Opinion and State of The Industry you can find serious commentary on issues that were prevelant on the games industry at the time of writing.

Finally, in Inappropriate Gaming Satire you can find all the humour articles. Please note that some of these articles contain topics that some readers will find extremely offensive, including strong language, adult themes, drug and sexual references and so on. Please do not read these articles if you are easily offended or shocked.

I hope you enjoy the posts!

Katy.

Why Google Chrome 17 is making small developers unhappy

In February 2012 Google introduced Chrome 17, and with it, enhancements to its Safe Browsing technology (these enhancements have persisted relatively unchanged in Chrome 18).