CoolBeans: From College to Industry

Which piece of code is not only reasier to read, but more efficient? Example 1: const int size = 10; bool FindValue( int value ) { int arr[size][ size]; Load(arr); bool fFound = false ; if ( value != 0 ) // Must have value greater...

Over this last week I had to debug two issues. If you’re a college student and read this blog, you would have discovered the problems in no time. MessageBox from Nowhere As a warm up, the easy one and a new Visual Studio feature: Break All. The...

…Program Managers on the other hand have anti-magic. A PM walks into a developer’s office to see something and BOOM! suddenly nothing works. The other day I was trying to demo a new feature. Everything worked fine but then the PM had to say “So does...

I could hear him coming up the stairs outside of my apartment. *Thump* *Thump* [Pause] *Thump* *Thump* Finally, there’s a loud rap at my door. I open it to see a man smelling of cigarette smoke, drenched in sweat, completely out of breath...

I remember taking a class where we had to perform a “code review”. The idea of a code review was that you periodically organize a meeting “not to last longer than three hours” and go line by line, asking questions and verify your thoughts as a developer...

I don’t know why, but I love business trips. Free food, free hotel, free travel. Not having to worry about buying tickets or paying for taxis or booking hotels or coworkers breaking the build. In the end you spend some 8 hours actually working but...

A tester told me the other day that I have the “dev magic touch” It’s a funny phenomenon. Mainly everything works perfectly on the developer’s machine, but promptly explodes on a test machine. Even better is when you go to a tester’s office and...

I was gone most of this week for a 3-day event, so I’ll leave you with this quick tip. In Visual Studio, when you’re debugging and you’re stepping through the program, move the cursor over a variable. Notice how you can expand it by clicking...

Am I the only person who knows what I mean when I say “We’ll have to decide by Thunderdome!!” ? If you don’t know, this is by far the best practice for deciding on which features to ship. Or who gets to go on a recruiting trip. Or for anything which...

I’m watching NOVA on one half of my screen while playing Geometry Wars on the other. It's smart too as it keeps the "primary" image at the correct 16:9 aspect ratio and compresses the "secondary" image to what's left (which is of little consequence for...

I just discovered that my TV has a split screen mode. I can watch TV and do something on the Xbox at the same time! This is great because I wanted to queue up a bunch of downloads, but I also wanted to watch recorded MythBusters. Thus I saved myself 5...