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The one who resurrected Duke Nukem: interview with Randy Pitchford, magician from Gearbox

Reading time38 min
Views4.2K
RUVDS and Habr continue the series of interviews with interesting people in IT field. Last time we talked to Richard «Levelord» Gray, level designer of popular games Duke Nukem, American McGee’s Alice, Heavy Metal F.A.K.K.2, SiN, Serious Sam, author of well-known «You’re not supposed to be here» phrase.

Today we welcome Randall Steward «Randy» Pitchford II, president, CEO and co-founder of Gearbox Software video game development company.

Randy started in 3D Realms where contributed to Duke Nukem 3D Atomic Edition and Shadow Warrior. Then he founded Gearbox Software and made Half-Life: Opposing Force, which won D.I.C.E in 2000. Other Gearbox titles include Half-Life: Blue Shift, Half-Life: Decay, Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, James Bond 007: Nightfire, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3, Halo: Combat Evolved and of course Borderlands.

The interview team also includes editor of Habr Nikolay Zemlyanskiy, Richard «Levelord» Gray, Randy’s wife Kristy Pitchford and Randy’s son Randy Jr.


The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon

Reading time5 min
Views1.3K



The 7.0 release marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer — the analysis is now available not only for the code, written in C, C++, C#, but also in Java. In addition to this global improvement, some existing mechanisms for the analysis are refined and improved, diagnostic rules are added. There was another significant change that you could hardly missed. We changed the icon.

Note. In the article, you will not find cunning tricks or tips on designing icons. The purpose of the article is a bit different this time — it is to tell a story, and, if possible, make it interesting.
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.NET Reference Types vs Value Types. Part 1

Reading time16 min
Views7.7K

First, let’s talk about Reference Types and Value Types. I think people don’t really understand the differences and benefits of both. They usually say reference types store content on the heap and value types store content on the stack, which is wrong.


Let’s discuss the real differences:


  • A value type: its value is an entire structure. The value of a reference type is a reference to an object. – A structure in memory: value types contain only the data you indicated. Reference types also contain two system fields. The first one stores 'SyncBlockIndex', the second one stores the information about a type, including the information about a Virtual Methods Table (VMT).
  • Reference types can have methods that are overridden when inherited. Value types cannot be inherited.
  • You should allocate space on the heap for an instance of a reference type. A value type can be allocated on the stack, or it becomes the part of a reference type. This sufficiently increases the performance of some algorithms.

However, there are common features:


  • Both subclasses can inherit the object type and become its representatives.

Let’s look closer at each feature.


This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

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Server-provided animations in iOS apps

Reading time5 min
Views2.8K


Hi everyone! About six months ago we launched one of Badoo’s most exciting features: Live Streaming. One of its main functionalities is that viewers can send gifts to their favourite streamers to express their appreciation. We wanted to make the gifts as fancy and as engaging as possible, so it was decided to make some of them really lively, and by this I mean animated. And to engage people even more, we, the Badoo team, planned to update those gifts and animations every few weeks.

As an iOS engineer, you might have already guessed the challenge we faced here: the need to add new animations and remove the old ones was going to require a fair amount of work from the client side. We’d need both the Android and the iOS development teams for every release — which, when combined with the amount of time App Store reviews and approval often take, would mean it might be days before each update could go live. But we solved the problem, and I’m going to explain to you how.

Solution overview


By this stage, we already knew how to export Adobe After Effects (AAE) animations into the format readable by our iOS app using the Lottie library. This time though, we went a bit further: we decided to create a kind of animation storage service, available via the internet. In other words, we would store all the actual animations on the server and deliver them to the client apps on demand:
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Wanna Play a Detective? Find the Bug in a Function from Midnight Commander

Reading time5 min
Views6.6K

bug

In this article, we invite you to try to find a bug in a very simple function from the GNU Midnight Commander project. Why? For no particular reason. Just for fun. Well, okay, it's a lie. We actually wanted to show you yet another bug that a human reviewer has a hard time finding and the static code analyzer PVS-Studio can catch without effort.
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PVS-Studio ROI

Reading time6 min
Views1.2K

PVS-Studio ROI

Occasionally, we're asked a question, what monetary value the company will receive from using PVS-Studio. We decided to draw up a response in the form of an article and provide tables, which will show how the analyzer can be useful. We cannot prove absolute accuracy of all calculations in the article, but we suppose the reader will agree with our thoughts, and it will help to make a decision in the matter of getting the license.
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PVS-Studio for Java

Reading time12 min
Views2.6K
PVS-Studio for Java

In the seventh version of the PVS-Studio static analyzer, we added support of the Java language. It's time for a brief story of how we've started making support of the Java language, how far we've come, and what is in our further plans. Of course, this article will list first analyzer trials on open source projects.
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Designing for Success: Crafting Effective Learning Experiences

Level of difficultyMedium
Reading time7 min
Views6.7K

The Challenge of Mandatory Learning
Once we had several mandatory learning courses designed to be passed successfully by all employees. Still, many of them struggled to do so. Reminder emails to all participants could not solve the issue. And that is when my team was summoned to develop a thorough plan to reduce the number of overdue courses to a minimum. Of course, we were asked to develop something fun and engaging.

Uncovering the Root Problems
While working on the project, we managed to uncover several problems with course assignments, including the fact that they were not offered just in time, there were too many of them, and all of them had different due dates, which made it impossible to remember when to complete them. Additionally, we found that the content itself was often dry and unengaging, further contributing to the lack of motivation among employees. Finally, we came up with a system of notifications that included clear explanatory reminder emails, an escalation system, and a redesign of the course content to make it more interactive and relevant to employees' daily work. The result was almost no overdue courses after system integration.

The Myth of Mandatory Fun
So the case first seemed to be about motivation and engagement, but it is actually about smart course design that allows people to worry about work tasks instead of worrying about course assignments. It's also about creating content that resonates with the learners and helps them see the value in the training.

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Introduce Static Analysis in the Process, Don't Just Search for Bugs with It

Reading time15 min
Views5.4K
This article is an authorized translation of the original post. The translation was made with the kind help of the guys from PVS-Studio. Thank you, guys!

What encouraged me to write this article is considerable quantity of materials on static analysis, which recently has been increasingly coming up. Firstly, this is a blog of PVS-Studio, which actively promotes itself on Habr posting reviews of errors, found by their tool in open source projects. PVS-Studio has recently implemented Java support, and, of course, developers from IntelliJ IDEA, whose built-in analyzer is probably the most advanced for Java today, could not stay away.

When reading these reviews, I get a feeling that we are talking about a magic elixir: click the button, and here it is — the list of defects right in front of your eyes. It seems that as analyzers get more advanced, more and more bugs will be found, and products, scanned by these robots, will become better and better without any effort on our part.

Well, but there are no magic elixirs. I would like to talk about what is usually not spoken in posts like «here are things that our robot can find»: what analyzers are not able to do, what's their real part and place in the process of software delivery, and how to implement the analysis properly.


Ratchet (source: Wikipedia).
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PC Speaker To Eleven

Reading time12 min
Views36K
Known now as a «motherboard speaker», or just «beeper», PC Speaker has been introduced in 1981 along with the first personal IBM computer. Being a successor of the big serious computers for serious business, it has been designed to produce very basic system beeps, so it never really had a chance to shine bright as a music device in numerous entertainment programs of the emerging home market. Overshadowed by much more advanced sound chips of popular home game systems, quickly replaced with powerful sound cards, it mostly served as a fallback option, playing severely downgraded content of better sound hardware.

«System Beeps» is a music album in shape of an MS-DOS program that features original music composed for PC Speaker using the same basic old techniques like ones found in classic PC games. It follows the usual retro computing demoscene formula — take something rusty and obsolete, and push it to eleven — and attempts to reveal the long hidden potential of this humble little sound device. You can hear it in action and form an opinion on how successful this attempt was at Bandcamp, or in the video below. The following article is an in-depth overview of the original PC Speaker capabilities and making of the project, for those who would like to know more.

Tarantool: an analyst's view

Reading time8 min
Views2K
Hi all! I'm Andrey Kapustin. I work as a system analyst at Mail.ru Group. Our products form a unified ecosystem. Many independent infrastructures generate data in it: taxi and food delivery services, email services, social networks, etc. The faster and more precise we can predict a client's needs, the sooner and more correctly we can offer our products. 

Many system analysts and engineers are keen to know: 

  1. How to design the architecture of a trigger platform for real-time marketing?
  2. How to arrange a data structure that would be in line with the requirements of a marketing strategy for interacting with clients?
  3. How to ensure the stable operations of the  system under very heavy workloads? 

Such systems are based on technologies of high-load processing and Big Data analysis. We have accumulated considerable experience in these areas. Our expertise is in high demand on the market.  I'm going to show how we help our customers to switch from off-line to on-line in their interactions with clients using Real-Time Marketing solutions based on Tarantool.
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Self-Development: How I Couldn't Wear Two Hats and Found Third One

Reading time18 min
Views2.6K


Hi all! I lead antispam team and several machine learning teams at Mail.ru Group. The subject of this article is self-development for team leads/managers. But in reality many techniques and recipes do not depend on the role at all. This really concerns me because machine learning is developing extremely fast, and it takes a lot of time to stay up to date. So the question about what should be done for development and how is quite topical.

Of course, the content of this article is not the ultimate truth but just a description of the results of my continuing quest. It tells about approaches based on books and workshops, trials and errors, which have worked for me. It'll be good to have a discussion with you in comments.
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Tips and tricks from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc, November 2019

Reading time3 min
Views2.8K

Tips and tricks from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc, November 2019

It is a new selection of tips and tricks about Python and programming from my Telegram-channel @pythonetc.

Previous publications.



PATH is an environment variable that stores paths where executables are looked for. When you ask your shell to run ls, the shell looks for the ls executable file across all paths that are presented in PATH.
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Deploying Tarantool Cartridge applications with zero effort (Part 1)

Reading time8 min
Views2K


We have already presented Tarantool Cartridge that allows you to develop and pack distributed applications. Now let's learn how to deploy and control these applications. No panic, it's all under control! We have brought together all the best practices of working with Tarantool Cartridge and wrote an Ansible role, which will deploy the package to servers, start and join instances into replica sets, configure authorization, bootstrap vshard, enable automatic failover and patch cluster configuration.

Interesting, huh? Dive in, check details under the cut.
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Checking Telegram Open Network with PVS-Studio

Reading time7 min
Views1.4K

Picture 3

Telegram Open Network (TON) is a platform by the same team that developed the Telegram messenger. In addition to the blockchain, TON provides a large set of services. The developers recently made the platform's code, which is written in C++, publicly available and uploaded it to GitHub. We decided to check the project before its official release.
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Support of Visual Studio 2019 in PVS-Studio

Reading time19 min
Views1.1K


Support of Visual Studio 2019 in PVS-Studio affected a number of components: the plugin itself, the command-line analyzer, the cores of the C++ and C# analyzers, and a few utilities. In this article, I will briefly explain what problems we encountered when implementing support of the IDE and how we addressed them.
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