The Legendary Fast Inverse Square Root

In the 90s, 3D video games were in their infancy, and the ability to render 3D graphics was constrained by hardware. This led programmers to devise creative ways to get around hardware limitations. One such innovation, known as the Fast Inverse Square Root…

Coding Challenge — Rectangle Rotation

Here’s a cool coding challenge I came across last week. When I first encountered it, I was stumped. It took me a few days of thinking about the problem, approaching it in different ways, and recognizing patterns to come up with a solution.

Continuations

Continuations give the programmer a way to control the flow of a program. While the concept itself exists in any programming language, continuations are most powerful in languages that treat them as first-class citizens and that include tail-call optimization. This post is an introduction to…

Programming Poetry: Duff’s Device

Duff’s Device is a really clever implementation of dynamic loop unrolling. Tom Duff wrote the code in 1983 while working at Lucasfilm. Duff invented his particular implementation of loop unrolling in order to optimize a routine that copied an array of shorts into the…

Shaker Maker: Part I

Building a posable figure in JavaScript

Thief: Milkmaid Heist

A couple weeks ago, I built a CLI game in Ruby with a friend and peer at Flatiron School, Cole Shapiro, called Thief…