Molly Rocket

Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/annarettberg/meow-the-infinite-book-two

This was a presentation I gave to the University of Twente in early 2021. It's a case study of how simple, straightforward coding can turn several thousand lines of code and 10's of seconds of runtime into a few dozen lines of code and a sub-second runtime. It attempts to provide concrete examples of why software is often an order of magnitude (or more) slower than it should be.

Simple Code, High Performance

A basic tutorial on Casey's GNU Emacs bindings, by request.  See http://handmadehero.org for details.

Basic Emacs Tutorial

The first - and probably last - time I will seriously respond to an arrogant, dismissive Twitter post on-stream. I felt it was worth doing at least once.

Esoterica: You'll notice that when I talk about how bad the Visual Studio watch window speed is, I say "default install", and I also explain part of the reason for the slowness (intentional delay). The reason that I know this, and refer to the default, is that there are - or at least were - undocumented ways of changing the delay to be lower, which may make the watch window more usable. I have not looked for these or tested them with the latest version, but if you are suffering with Visual Studio's slow watch window, and for some reason don't want to switch to something like RemedyBG, I would encourage you to search on-line for the latest way to edit the watch window delay. It may help you go less insane!

Twitter and Visual Studio Rant

[EPILEPSY WARNING] At the end of this video, I demonstrate colored text on colored background tiles.  The reference renderer displays this benchmark so quickly that the screen appears to flash colors violently.  If you are photo-sensitive, you may want to stop watching the video before I run the colored text demo. [/EPILEPSY WARNING]

Many modern terminals (like Windows Terminal, etc.) run extremely slowly - often hundreds or thousands of times slower than PC hardware allows.  Yet for some reason, pointing this out leads to lots of strange excuses from developers, all of which are not true.

In this video, I demonstrate how a very simple (~3000 line) codebase written in a few days - and literally never optimized at all - still runs by default at thousands of frames per second under real-world conditions, while supporting features that many modern terminals don't, like right-to-left strings of Arabic combining Unicode.

The course mentioned in the video is Star Code Galaxy (https://starcodegalaxy.com).

The code for this reference rasterizer is available under GPLv2 on GitHub (https://github.com/cmuratori/refterm)

[EPILEPSY WARNING] How fast should an unoptimized terminal run?

There are promising candidates for "laws" governing computer software. But are there any specifically for software architecture? In this lecture, I describe the only viable candidate I've so far seen.

Originally given to the School of Informatics of the Technical University of Madrid.

The Only Unbreakable Law

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/annarettberg/meow-the-infinite-book-two

Q&A: https://youtu.be/cOcaj_cRBvE

Rebroadcast of an invited live lecture I gave to infura.io on https://www.twitch.tv/handmade_hero. The original had bad audio for the first few minutes, so I re-recorded and spliced it in for this corrected version. Otherwise, it is the same as the original live stream.

Where Does Bad Code Come From?

Day 1 of the introduction to C programming on Windows series from Handmade Hero.  See http://handmadehero.org for details.

1. Getting up to speed with C programming on Windows
2. Getting a C compiler via Microsoft Visual Studio Express: 
2.1. Caveat: In the next video, we suggest you to get Visual Studio Community instead of Visual Studio Express, you can get Visual Studio Community here: http://www.visualstudio.com/
3. Creating a “Win32 Project”
4. Adding a C++ file: test.cpp
5. Compiling and Debugging project
6. WinMain entry point function
7. Creating and calling a function

Intro to C on Windows - Day 1

A historical argument for creating a stable instruction set architecture (ISA) for entire system-on-a-chip (SoC) packages.

Please note that although it's never mentioned in the audio there was a typo in the slide deck that makes the situation even more ludicrous when comparing 1990's machine to 2015's: the hard drive line erroneously said "gig" for the 1990's machine.  It should have said "mb".  The specs were the A3000, which never had any hard drives even close to 1 gig, let alone 50 gigs!