• Sep 4, 2017

  Get Started with Git

  Version control. A somewhat foreign phrase for most casual programmers. Unless you are invested in making long, elaborate software, you wouldn’t need to use it. However, it wouldn’t hurt to utilize one of the most popular version control systems out there: Git. Not only is it widely adopted in the open source community (with online hosting services such as GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket using the tool to help developers host their code remotely), but it is also used in enterprise as well, most notably by Microsoft! Using Git at first can be somewhat of a hassle, but once you get into the rhythm of using it, you will start to wonder why you didn’t use it in the first place.

• Aug 21, 2017

  Syntax, Semantics and Pragmatics

  Most mainstream programming languages centre around the English language. Even so, the fact that the code of any given programming language is so detached from even a basic, grammatically correct sentence, you might as well be learning another language altogether. An article by Artem Chistyakov, a Russian developer, brought to my attention the inherent difficulty of programming in these English-centric languages for non-English speakers. I was rather impressed that he and his peers managed to learn the C language… through a Russian-medium university course. As much as it was absurd to me, it was practical decision. Russia’s education is taught exclusively in Russian, and its students would be more comfortable learning about programming in their mother tongue. That being said, perhaps most English-speaking programmers take for granted the fact that they can easily refer to documentation online and get what they want while their non-English speaking peers struggle to understand colloquial and technical terms that litter the vocabulary of most programmers, most notably words and phrases such as spaghetti code, polymorphism, preprocessor directives and so on.

• Aug 18, 2017

  Persistence in Programming

  I spent most of my high school years either playing videogames or occupied with my studies. I still very much enjoyed programming, but that was a pastime that I couldn’t really relish in without a major time investment. With my high school final year exam approaching, my schoolmates and I were focused on revising for the ten (yes, 10!) subjects we were to take. My code was put aside in favour of calculus, linguistics and the sciences. (Ironically, I scored an A- for my biology, a subject I couldn’t have cared less about.) I was going through a tough time in my life as well, and when I was not playing videogames, I was reading fiction. So my (average) programming skills took a back seat while I hit the books and I wouldn’t have gone back to it until after that final exam.

• Aug 16, 2017

  I Am Making My Solutions Open Source!

  This decision wasn’t a tough one, but it was bound to happen anyway. I will be taking Introduction to Programming as part my core subjects in university very soon, but rather than breeze through this subject while I watch inexperienced students struggle to remember boilerplate code, I am making my code available to them by making it open source. I have created a public repository to upload my lab exercise solutions for this subject, which you can view here. This repository will contain mostly C code, but I am expecting C++ to be included at some point.

• Aug 15, 2017

  An Introduction to Hexadecimals

  Hexadecimals are an important concept in computing, especially in low-level programs. Essentially, hexidecimal (or hex) is a numerical system of base 16, whereby the numbers 0 to 9 are represented as usual but the numbers 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 15 are represented by a, b, c, d, e and f respectively. In most programming languages, the prefix for hex numbers is denoted by ‘0x’. For example, the number 255 is 0xff in hex. While it may not be immediately apparent how hex numbers work, we need to go to the register-level to understand their application.

• Aug 8, 2017

  We Sprung a Leak, Captain!

  A streak of lightning flashed across the ominous sky, followed shortly by the ear-splitting boom of thunder. The ship rocked violently against the giant waves, her crew and passengers bracing themselves for dear life. The captian stood in the icy rain, hollering orders to the sailers on deck. He had grown hoarse from raising his voice, but he couldn’t rest now: too many lives were at stake. Twice he almost slipped on the wet floorboards, and he had a feeling he’d loose his footing on the third or fourth slip. A sailor exclaimed something he couldn’t quite hear. The sailor yelled again, but this time he heard it loud and clear: “We sprung a leak, Captain!”

• Jul 31, 2017

  Hello New World

  I wanted to try out blogging through GitHub Pages, and here’s what I got. I’ll probably update it from time to time to ensure I get what I want. So that means this is pretty much a work in progress.

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