During the last year I had to take care of a personal issue that consumed most of my time and energy. So I fell short of several of my goals in 2018. Review Goals 2018 1. Read 3 technical Books I read Uncle Bobs “Clean Architecture”. 2. Improve the Chess Engine I Continue reading
Intro on How to Write a Chess Engine
I am interested in chess and always wanted to write my own chess engine. About a year ago I started to code my own engine MantaChessEngine in C#. The goal is that the engine beats me. As I’m not a strong player that should not be much of a problem. Today my engine can actually Continue reading
The 3 Most Important Ideas from The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone
Recently I read this great book by Grant Cardone. To help myself and others to actually use the content I write down the three ideas that stood out the most for me. Here they are: 10X Goals and 10X Action For some reason we humans underestimate the actions required to achieve a goal. It Continue reading
How to Code Fizzbuzz Without If-Statements or Loops
A while ago I was attending the Global day of Coderetreat in Zurich. It is a day long coding practice event. Attendees work together in groups of two. In each session we coded the kata “game of life” from scratch puttygen , each time with different constraints. The constraint I found very interesting was this: Continue reading
How to Win Friends and Influence People – Dale Carnegie
Recently I have seen several recommendations for the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie so I went to the local library and picked it up. It was a great read with real practical advice and lots of examples. The title sounds somewhat cheesy and manipulative but it’s not at all. Continue reading
Localization TextManager for Unity3d
When trying to add localization to my mobile game Level It! for Android I wanted to use the .net resource manager but unfortunately got a weird error message from Visual Studio. Apparently this is not supported with Unity3d. This post describes a simple text manager to do the localization with Unity 3d. My starting point Continue reading
Review 2017 and Resolutions 2018
Review 2017 Here’s a quick review of the goals of 2017: Deploy and maintain “Level It!”. It is deployed and I developed the second release with several improvements. See Level It! page Chess engine that beats me. I developed the engine however it does not beat me yet. See Manta Chess Engine on Github Read Continue reading
Regex Jumpstart Tutorial
Several times in a project I had to use regular expressions to match some pattern in a string. I started reading several tutorials but the regexes looked just too cryptic to me. Fortunately I always found the answer on Stackoverflow that either did exactly what I wanted or something similar that could be adapted easily. Continue reading
#define private public
The other day I was talking to a friend and he told me about something he was doing. He has a C++ dll and the according h-file. Now he wanted to access some private methods in the dll. There is no reflection in C++ and he does not have the source code. How can you Continue reading
Why is “catch (Exception ex)” a problem?
Let’s consider the code below. In the try block there is a bug (null reference exception). This is then caught in the catch block and logged. Why is this catch (Exception ex) a problem? There is a bug in the try block. If the bug is just logged you are unlikely to notice there is Continue reading