Tyler A. Young’s Blog

09 March 2018

Git Cheat Sheet

These are a few of the Git commands I find myself looking up all the time.

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25 October 2017

Hiring Software Developers

The traditional hiring process—source a billion resumes, eliminate them based on keywords, interview the top hundred people, then pick one—is pretty broken. Fundamentally, filtering by pre-existing experience with your tech makes you miss the enormous swath of smart people who _could_ get up to speed on your stack quickly, and potentially become tremendously valuable to you. Whenever I hear people lament that it’s impossible to hire developers, my first question is always: how many good devs are you excluding from your search? Continue reading…
08 June 2017

Speeding Up SVN Checkout for Large Repositories

After moving our gigantic SVN repo to a new server, we wanted to speed it up. Note that some of these recommendations are peculiar to using the svn+ssh:// protocol. If you’re serving SVN via Apache or something, you might need very different advice.

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07 June 2017

Migrating a Large SVN Repository to a New Server

We ran into a situation at work where we needed to move our SVN repo from an old Linux server (running Ubuntu 10.04, in 2017!!) to a shiny new cloud instance.

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23 January 2017

Notes on Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom

Game Programming Patterns is a game developer’s guide to the design patterns most often useful in that domain. You can read it online for free.

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18 April 2016

“Invention is Drudgery”

As a guy who’s spent the last 18 months working on a particular drudgery, with another 6 months to go, this really resonated with me.

What looks from the outside like a flashy, amazing outcome was probably the results of long, mostly boring toil. (So take heart, ye who toil long on important-yet-maybe-boring work!)

Read “Invention is Drudgery” by Jason Cohen

Sarah's Paintings

Some of my wife Sarah’s best work to date. (Mind you, she’s only been painting for a year at this point.)

16 July 2014

Highlights from Robert C. Martin’s Clean Code

This page collects the things I found really insightful in Martin’s Clean Code. By “insightful,” I mean things I didn’t already practice as a programmer with a couple years of experience. Thus, I’ve skipped over tips like “don’t be afraid of long variable names” in favor of things like “functions should act at one level of abstraction.”

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07 May 2014

Notes from Andre Alexandrescu’s Modern C++ Design

Here are my highlights from Andre Alexandrescu’s Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied.

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02 May 2014

Stupid Type Conversions in C++98

If you’re working on a C++98 project, you have my condolences.

There are a number of type conversions that newer versions of C++ make super easy, but which are not included in C++98.

Here’s my reference for these:

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30 April 2014

C++ Pointers & References Cheat Sheet

My dirty little secret: I’ve spent too much time in fancy-pants languages like Java… and Python… and Ruby… and PHP… and Javascript… to remember what the & does all the time.

This is my cheat sheet. Hope it helps you too.

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08 June 2011

The Problem of Collision Avoidance in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

During the 2011 NSF-funded REU on collision avoidance in UAVs at Auburn University, my team performed a literature review describing the most well-represented methods of collision avoidance. You can download the paper as a PDF.

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02 March 2011

On the Acquisition of Semantic Categories

This paper, written for my Language and the Mind course, is a summary of the current state of knowledge regarding the acquisition of semantic categories–that is, what we know about how you learn the meaning of words.

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21 February 2011

Does HAL Cry Digital Tears? Emotion and Computers – Rosalind Picard

This is an abstract of a chapter from Rosalind W. Picard’s book HAL’s Legacy. The piece is available on the MIT Press site here (note that there are 9 sections to the chapter).

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