RESOURCES

World Wide Web Winners

Resources & Inspiration

This list is a culmination of my absolute favourite resources and inspiring posts and stories across the internet. These are all things that I find myself coming back to every few months, some are inspiring, some motivating, some frankly have just taken three or four tries to actually understand what’s happening..

All the links here are to resources that remind me of why I love programming and all the quirks and challenges that come along with it. Hopefully some of them can do that for you too.

Fast Inverse Square Root

From the source of ‘Quake 3’, a black magic approximation of an inverse square root function.

float Q_rsqrt( float number )
{
    long i;
    float x2, y;
    const float threehalfs = 1.5F;

    x2 = number * 0.5F;
    y  = number;
    i  = * ( long * ) &y;    // evil floating point bit level hacking
    i  = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );               // what the fuck? 
    y  = * ( float * ) &i;
    y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 1st iteration
//  y  = y * ( threehalfs - ( x2 * y * y ) );   // 2nd iteration,
                                              // this can be removed

    return y;
}

A mesmerizing piece of code so inspiring I can’t help but return to bask in it’s glow every few months. No other lines of code have ever made me want to sit down and write code more than this has.

IOCCC - Yusuke Endoh’s ASCII Fluid Simulation

IOCCC, or the International Obfuscated C Code Contest is an annual “celebration of C’s syntactical opaqueness” that first started in 1984.

This particular 2012 submission by Yusuke Endoh (Also a developer of Ruby) is an ASCII fluid simulation, that can use it’s own source code as a starting configuration:

endoh1.c

#  include<stdio.h>//  .IOCCC                                         Fluid-  #
#  include <unistd.h>  //2012                                         _Sim!_  #
#  include<complex.h>  //||||                     ,____.              IOCCC-  #
#  define              h for(                     x=011;              2012/*  #
#  */-1>x              ++;)b[                     x]//-'              winner  #
#  define              f(p,e)                                         for(/*  #
#  */p=a;              e,p<r;                                        p+=5)//  #
#  define              z(e,i)                                        f(p,p/*  #
## */[i]=e)f(q,w=cabs  (d=*p-  *q)/2-     1)if(0  <(x=1-      w))p[i]+=w*/// ##
   double complex a [  97687]  ,*p,*q     ,*r=a,  w=0,d;    int x,y;char b/* ##
## */[6856]="\x1b[2J"  "\x1b"  "[1;1H     ", *o=  b, *t;   int main   (){/** ##
## */for(              ;0<(x=  getc (     stdin)  );)w=x  >10?32<     x?4[/* ##
## */*r++              =w,r]=  w+1,*r     =r[5]=  x==35,  r+=9:0      ,w-I/* ##
## */:(x=              w+2);;  for(;;     puts(o  ),o=b+  4){z(p      [1]*/* ##
## */9,2)              w;z(G,  3)(d*(     3-p[2]  -q[2])  *P+p[4      ]*V-/* ##
## */q[4]              *V)/p[  2];h=0     ;f(p,(  t=b+10  +(x=*p      *I)+/* ##
## */80*(              y=*p/2  ),*p+=p    [4]+=p  [3]/10  *!p[1])     )x=0/* ##
## */ <=x              &&x<79   &&0<=y&&y<23?1[1  [*t|=8   ,t]|=4,t+=80]=1/* ##
## */, *t              |=2:0;    h=" '`-.|//,\\"  "|\\_"    "\\/\x23\n"[x/** ##
## */%80-              9?x[b]      :16];;usleep(  12321)      ;}return 0;}/* ##
####                                                                       ####
###############################################################################
**###########################################################################*/

Self-documenting code in the worst way..

“How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%”

Fixing an JSON parsing bug in an 8 year old game that’s made over $6.4 billion since launch. An incredible story of profiling, decompilation and reverse-engineering to fix a 6 minute load time that dropped down to under 2 minutes.

Effective Java by Joshua Bloch

Not exactly an internet gem, but a book that I really enjoyed reading, with some serious great advice and guidelines on writing better Java code. A must read in my opinion for someone at an intermediate or so level of Java.

Personally it really helped me overcome some imposter syndrome type feelings, and something I like to come back to every now and then to refresh my memory.

The case of the 500-mile email

A classic funny tech support story from the mid 90s, a university professor that “can’t send an email more than 500 miles”. A great story if you’ve never read it before, and certainly one of my favourites out there.

The Hutter Prize

A compression challenge to compress 1GB of text from Wikipedia. Marcus Hutter launched the challenge in 2006 with a €50,000 prize, and has recently (2020) been upped to a €500,000 prize.

The motivation behind the contest is the idea that general compression is closely related to intelligence, and whilst intelligence is a difficult concept to quantify, file sizes give a hard quantitative score. The contest has been largely dominated by Alexander Rhatushnyak, although the most recent winner is Artemiy Margaritov in May 2021 who compressed the 1GB file down to just 115MB.

The compression techniques used are pretty magical, and the contest as a whole is a great rabbit hole to get lost in for an afternoon.

Ben Eater

Hours and hours of detailed video content building breadboard computers. Fantastic for learning how computers work, both the 8-bit and 6502 computers from scratch series are a great intro into that space. Covering from the very bottom with logic gates, all the way to functional breadboard computers and ASM.

Code Golf StackExchange

Programming challenges with the winner decided by the fewest number of bytes in the source code. A celebration of language quirks, specialised languages, arguably useless optimisation.

Fizz Buzz

Code Golf thread for the classic Fizz Buzz programming exercise, great examples of some of the fun and crazy solutions across various languages.

It’s full of impressive ingenuity, solving useless problems. Here are some of my favourite answers across the site:

  • Fizz Buzz in Hexagony: 
        3 } 1 " $ .
   ! $ > ) } g 4
  _ . { $ ' ) ) \
 < $ \ . \ . @ \ }
F \ $ / ; z ; u ; <
 % < _ > _ . . $ > B /
< > } ) ) ' % < > {
 > ; e " - < / _ %
  ; \ / { } / > .
   \ ; . z ; i ;
    . . > ( ( '
  • Fizz Buzz in Python 2: An weirdly genius solution in a more common language: 
    # Python 2, 56 bytes
i=0;exec"print i%3/2*'Fizz'+i%5/4*'Buzz'or-~i;i+=1;"*100

    High Throughput Fizz Buzz

  • High Throughput Fizz Buzz: Whilst arguably not so much in the spirit of code-golf, outputting fizz buzz at over 54 GiB/s is a masterpiece.

Object Detection from 9FPS to 650 FPS in 6 Steps

A great read on pushing Python-based object detection pipeline to the limit. Even more impressive is the two follow on articles, pushing all the way to 2530 FPS.