Highlighted Blog Posts Over the Years

Some selected posts

A Developer's Life Stages - a taxonomy of developer growth from under-engineering to over-engineering to mature simplicity.

Underengineering Undead - a candid postmortem of an unfinished Ultima-like RPG whose lack of architecture made it unfinishable.

Some Perfect Hash - a perfect-hash optimization for Cactus Kev’s poker hand evaluator that substantially speeds up five-card evaluation.

NCAA 08's Video Highlights - a behind-the-scenes look at building in-game video highlight capture and upload under tight console constraints for EA's NCAA 08.

Times of Lore Maps - a nostalgic post sharing extracted maps from the PC version of Times of Lore.

Indigo Ocho - a brief App Store note for Indigo Ocho, an eight-ball adventure game set around a dangerous tower.

Sieve of Eratosthenes - an optimized C++ (and assembly) prime-counting sieve written for an EA programming challenge.

Poker Revisited + ESPN - a short update linking the old poker evaluator work to Coding the Wheel’s roundup and mentioning ESPN virtual play-by-play work.

Let Me Count the Ways - a dive into fast enumeration of combinations, moving from brute force to bit-level and recursive/iterative optimizations.

Let Me Count the Ways Part II - a follow-up showing that the optimized combination generator is ultimately bottlenecked by memory bandwidth.

The Relic - a launch/postmortem overview of The Relic, a solo-built 3D iOS action RPG published by Chillingo.

7 - an exploration of fast seven-card poker hand evaluation using compact indexing of 52-bit card sets.

JSON Parser for Objective C - a simple Objective-C JSON parser built on the earlier string code.

C String Library for C and Objective C - a minimal C string utility library adapted for Objective-C and C++ work.

Java-Style Properties Files in C++: A small utility release for reading Java-style properties files from C++.