One of the things I do on a regular basis is mentor at our local CoderDojo. For the last couple of years I’ve been teaching kids how to program games in Scratch. Between you and me, Scratch can be made to do some wonderful things, and it’s a great platform for learning games development on, but if you do anything more complicated than move a player sprite around the screen, then it can get quickly …
I’m a keen cyclist and, with a few friends, have racked up a fair few miles over the years cycling for pleasure, commuting and charity. Last year, for example, we cycled the C2C (Sea to Sea) cycle route from Whitehaven to Sunderland for a local charity over a couple of days. My bike is equipped for commuting & longer tours; nice panniers, bright lights, comfy seat and cycle computer. The cycle computer is the weakest …
Bare metal programming is the art of writing code for a microcomputer that runs directly on the hardware (metal) bypassing the need for an operating system. This method of programming was common practice back in the early days of software development and was prevalent amongst games developers. The practice probably died out after the advent of Microsoft’s DirectX API. Up until that point the only games you’d get in Windows 3.1 were simple affairs, such …