The Professional Programmer

Everyone will tell you something different about how to setup a git project and how to establish contribution policies. But there is a certain way I like to setup group projects in git (whether it's GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab makes no difference) that works for me, and you are welcome to use it as well. Or not. It's okay if we disagree.

Last week I was traveling to a conference, and realized (due, in small part, to my "companions" on the flight home) that it might be worthwhile to write-up my personal etiquette rules for airline travel. Whether it's for work or leisure, there are a few rules that everyone should keep in mind.

I've been promising for some time to put together some reviews of books related to programming, AI, networking, and other topics I tend to talk about on this blog. Well, I've finally been able to sit down and read a book (based in no small part to the fact that I was on a plane last week).

If you spend enough time in technology, it becomes inevitable. Travel. It seems so glamorous at first. Your company is willing to spend what is sometimes non-trivial sums of money to send you off to some new location, where you will be their representative to the hundreds or thousands of other people attending the meeting or conference. Then the realization occurs: How do I make the most of my conference time?

We're all busy. Probably busier than we'd like to be. But in all of the chaos that is the daily life of a professional programmer, we have to remember to stay up to date - not only with our own areas of technical expertise, but with what's going on in the world around us. So to kick off this reading list section, I'm going to give a quick run down of the things I try to read on a daily basis.

Last week I posted about Arrays of Structures vs. Structures of Arrays , and the response was pretty great. I did get some feedback that I had left out one important concept:

It's one of those things that might have an obvious answer if you have ever written scientific software for a vector machine. For everyone else, it's something you probably never even thought about: Should I write my code with arrays of structures (or classes), or structures (or classes) of arrays. Read on to see how both approaches perform, and what kind of readability you can expect from each approach.