Ben Garney

TCP is the worst abstraction. You are hopefully familiar with Leaky Abstractions as described by Joel Spolsky. The idea is that when you add layers to hide messy details, you can mostly avoid having to know what exactly is going on – until something breaks. Think of it as putting a smooth plastic coating on your car.…

Continuing from last week’s thoughts about build systems, let’s talk about build servers. Say you’ve gotten a build system, like CMake, up and running in your project. Now the developers on your project are doing consistent builds across all your different platforms, and people are hopefully not missing important build steps anymore. However, there can…

I got fed up one day, and wrote a simple bitmap font renderer, BMFontRenderer. It parses bitmap font data from a generator like BMFont or Hiero (link on middle right of sidebar) and renders text of your choosing to a BitmapData. BMFontRenderer is under the MIT license, so you can use it as you like.…

One of my posts on the Flash display list was quoted recently in a post by Amos Laber on his excellent blog. He said: So developers like Ben Garney are opting to write their own renderers in order to gain better performance, but that is not an ideal long term solution. A much better one…