If architects had to work like programmers

Leave a reply

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion.

My house should have between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Keep in mind that the house I ultimately choose must cost less than the one I am currently living in. Make sure, however, that you correct all the deficiencies that exist in my current house (the floor of my kitchen vibrates when I walk across it, and the walls don't have nearly enough insulation in them).

As you design, also keep in mind that I want to keep yearly maintenance costs as low as possible. This should mean the incorporation of extra-cost features like aluminum, vinyl, or composite siding. (If you choose not to specify aluminum, be prepared to explain your decision in detail.)

Please take care that modern design practices and the latest materials are used in construction of the house, as I want it to be a showplace for the most up-to-date ideas and methods. Be alerted, however, that kitchen should be designed to accommodate, among other things, my 1952 Gibson refrigerator.

To insure that you are building the correct house for our entire family, make certain that you contact each of our children, and also our in-laws. My mother-in-law will have very strong feelings about how the house should be designed, since she visits us at least once a year. Make sure that you weigh all of thses options carefully and come to the right decision. I, however, retain the right to overrule any choices that you make.

Please don't bother me with small details right now. Your job is to develop the overall plans for the house: get the big picture. At this time, for example, it is not appropriate to be choosing the color of the carpet. However, keep in mind that my wife likes blue.

Also, do not worry at this time about acquiring the resources to build the house itself. Your first priority is to develop detailed plans and specifications. Once I approve these plans, however, I would expect the house to be under roof within 48 hours.

While you are designing this house specifically for me, keep in mind that sooner or later I will have to sell it to someone else. It therefore should have appeal to a wide variety of potential buyers. Please make sure before you finalize the plans that there is a consensus of the population in my area that they like the features this house has.

I advise you to run up and look at my neighbor's house he constructed last year. We like it a great deal. It has many features that we would also like in our new home, particularily the 75-foot swimming pool. With careful engineering, I believe that you can design this into our new house without impacting the final cost.

Please prepare a complete set of blueprints. It is not necessary at this time to do the real design, since they will be used only for construction bids. Be advised, however, that you will be held accountable for any increase of construction costs as a result of later design changes.

You must be thrilled to be working on as an interesting project as this! To be able to use the latest techniques and materials and to be given such freedom in your designs is something that can't happen very often. Contact me as soon as possible with your complete ideas and plans.

PS: My wife has just told me that she disagrees with many of the instructions I've given you in this letter. As architect, it is your responsibility to resolve these differences. I have tried in the past and have been unable to accomplish this. If you can't handle this responsibility, I will have to find another architect.

PPS: Perhaps what I need is not a house at all, but a travel trailer. Please advise me as soon as possible if this is the case.

submitted by whjms to ProgrammerHumor
[link] [3 Kommentare]

via reddit: the front page of the internet http://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1e1aty/if_architects_had_to_work_like_programmers/

TraceGL: A JavaScript Codeflow Visualization and Debugging Tool using WebGL

Leave a reply

Rik Arends has just released TraceGL, an interesting JavaScript codeflow debugging tool using WebGL for its UI rendering.  Described as “an oscilloscope, for code”, TraceGL is an improvement on the familiar step debuggers that can be found in browser dev tools like Chrome, Firebug, and now Firefox itself.

TraceGL works by instrumenting all of your code so it knows when calls took place, and all of the boolean logic that determined which code path to take.  Then it visualizes all of this, using WebGL for performance, showing you a high level overview called the “mini map” in the top left, a log of function calls in the top right, the call stack in the bottom left, and finally the code for the function in the bottom right.

As your code runs, TraceGL visualizes all of this data in real time.  The mini map is useful to see the ebbs and flows of the code, i.e. where the stack gets deeper and shallower again.  In this way, you can see where events are being processed, like mouse or keyboard events in the browser, or HTTP requests in a Node.js application, and then get to a section of the potentially very long call stack very quickly.  TraceGL even works over asynchronous events, unlike most step debuggers, which means that these operations are still shown as part of a single call stack under their originating calls, rather than as separate events.

Here is a video showing TraceGL in use:

TraceGL can instrument both browser based and Node.js applications, and integrates with various editors so that double clicking a line can open your favorite editor.  An interesting aspect of the UI is that it is written entirely using WebGL, apparently for performance reasons.  Of course, all of the text rendering (most of the UI) must have been done in a 2d canvas and then uploaded to WebGL as a texture since WebGL has no native text rendering capabilities, but clever rendering tricks like only re-rendering what has changed can make things fast.  And once the textures are on the GPU, moving them around, scaling them, etc. using shaders is very fast.

I think we’re probably going to see more and more WebGL user interfaces soon.  We’ve seen a lot of 3D stuff written on top of WebGL, and it is certainly good for that, but I’m betting that normal 2D user interfaces on the web will start being written with it too, just thanks to its great performance characteristics.  HTML and CSS is great for documents and applications, to a point, but for web apps to compete with native on performance, hardware accelerated UIs on top of WebGL will be important.

Of course, building user interfaces using WebGL means that any text rendering that is done won’t be selectable, copyable, or accessible to screen readers without lots of additional work, so I can see frameworks being developed to facilitate this.  I’ve already been working on and off on something similar to Apple’s Core Animation framework on top of WebGL (not public yet), and other interesting 2D frameworks like Pixi.js have been released recently.  Especially with WebGL’s likely support in Internet Explorer 11, I think the age of WebGL user interfaces is upon us, and it’s  exciting!

You can check out TraceGL on their website.  It costs $15 to buy, but not all good tools are free and it’s nice to support good developers, so give it a shot and let me know what you think in the comments!

via Badass JavaScript http://badassjs.com/post/48702496345/tracegl-a-javascript-codeflow-visualization-and