[In this reprinted #altdevblogaday-opinion piece, WB Games/Kindling Games' Kristen Bornemann offers independent developers advice on iterating and shipping their projects as fast as possible.]From agile and scrum to extreme programming, everyone's trying to nail down what it takes to iterate on products quickly and efficiently. There are a lot of methodologies that you can employ to guide you through shipping products. But today, I'll be talking specifically about video games and how, as a developer, you can use a loose process and follow some basic rules in order to get quality games quickly ...

Another thing that we did at Google that I thought was surprisingly effective and useful was strict coding standards. Before my time at Google, I was sure that coding standards were pointless. I had absolutely no doubt that they were the kind of thing that petty bureaucrats waste time writing and then use to hassle people who are actually productive. I was seriously wrong. At Google, I could look at any piece of code, anywhere in Google's codebase, and I could read it. The fact that I was allowed to do that was pretty unusual in itself. But what was surprising to me was just how much the sta...

Overview This article is written for the benefit of someone familiar with regular expressions but not with the use of regular expressions in C++ via the TR1 (C++ Standards Committee Technical Report 1) extensions. Comparisons will be made with Perl for those familiar with Perl, though no knowledge of Perl is required. The focus is not on the syntax of regular expressions per se but rather how to use regular expressions to search for patterns and make replacements. Support for TR1 extensions in Visual Studio 2008 is added as a feature pack. It is also included in Visual Studio 2010. Other im...

First off, welcome to the fraternity. There aren’t too many people who want to create stuff and solve problems. You are a hacker. You are one of those who wants to do something interesting.“When you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability."– WhyTheLuckyStiffTake the words below with a pinch of salt. All these come from me – a bag-and-tag programmer. I love to get things working, rather than sit at something and over-optimize it.Start creating something just for fun. That’s a great start! There’s no way you ...

I've had some interesting discussions with other developers about writing code recently. I often have the impression that some developers put too much emphasis on clean code. Don't get me wrong, i strive for clean code as well, and have written about its importance quite a lot in the past couple of years. But when i'm coding, clean code is my secondary goal and it could never take the place of my primary goal: making it work. And preferably, i want to make it work great. A lot of people love to talk the talk when it comes to writing clean code. They'll stress their dedication to it, in some ca...

I know many good developers who are under the impression that they either don’t have to sell themselves, or selling themselves is wrong, but is that really true?First let me clarify by defining what I mean by “selling yourself”. I don’t mean “selling out”, I mean marketing yourself, what you’re doing and what your skills are. Especially to your organization.I don’t need to sell myself, my code speaks for itself.Really? Do you think your pristine code says enough about your skills especially to a non or semi-technical person? Think back about ...

By default, pattern matching is greedy, which means that the matcherreturns the longest match possible. For example, applying the patternA.*c to AbcAbcA matches AbcAbc rather than the shorterAbc. To do nongreedy matching, a question mark must be added tothe quantifier. For example, the pattern A.*?c will find theshortest match possible.COPY// Greedy quantifiersString match = find("A.*c", "AbcAbc"); // AbcAbcmatch = find("A.+", "AbcAbc"); // AbcAbc// Nongreedy quantifiersmatch = find("A.*?c", "AbcAbc"); // Abcmatch = find("A.+?", "AbcAbc"); // Abc// Returns the first s...

Before all the laws of software, before the purpose of software, before the science of software design itself, there is a singular fact that determines the success or failure of a software developer. This fact makes the difference between the senior engineer who can seem to pick up new languages in a day and the junior developer who struggles for ten years just to get a paycheck, programming other people’s designs and never improving enough to get a promotion. It differentiates the poor programmers from the good ones, the good programmers from the great ones, and the great ones from the...