The first programming language I wrote significant code in was a dinky little scripting language attached to a GUI-based game development program called Game Maker (since rebranded to GameMaker: Studio). The program provides graphical interfaces for creating objects and defining their behaviour by dragging, dropping, arranging and filling in fields, and you can quite happily use this and only this to make a large variety of games: GM works on abstract enough concepts that you’re not restricted to one or two genres of game like you might be if...
I have been reflexively using Git version control for all of my programming projects since being introduced to it by Michael Hartl’s excellent Ruby on Rails Tutorial book. The most immediate and obvious advantage of doing this is the ability to use Github, Bitbucket and others as online backups of one’s work – the especially paranoid can even tie their code to more than one of these hosts, or host their own Git server. And then, with a few pulls and...
As part of a university course, I’ve spent the past few weeks programming an Android app for location-based alarms and sound profile changing. It’s not a novel idea, but it seemed like a reasonable medium between ease-of-implementation (not requiring an external database or more than one phone for testing) and actual utility and I didn’t really have any better ideas.
For my development environment I chose Eclipse because that’s what the course lecturer recommended and what seemed easiest. Not being entirely unable to...
