Programming

The 2020 Advent of Code ended less than a week ago, and I thought the best way to cope with the void it left behind is writing a post about how I’ve seen it. This was my 5th year I jumped into it, but only the first one I actually did all the tasks. Just a small warning, this post contains some minor spoilers. This year my aim was to do all the tasks as fast as possible, so I didn’t use a new language. I started with Python, but after the second week, it became obvious that I don’t know it enough to be fast with it, as I had to look up things every day, which took some time. After that, I moved to Kotlin, which was a bit slower because of the compilation time, but my better knowledge of the language paid off. I also rewrote my existing solutions to Kotlin to have them all in one place. You can find it on GitHub, and as you can see, it has a few solutions for tasks from the previous years. I’m planning on going back and doing every task ever released, but that’ll take some time. ...

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a video that led me into a rabbit hole. It resulted in a simple application that overlays a sudoku’s solution into the camera image of the puzzle. This post is about the process of getting to the end result. It all started with the idea of writing a sudoku solver. The first version was ready relatively quickly, but there was one big problem: entering the starting position was slow and tedious. That’s when I realized that I could use the camera on my phone as the input device. I’ve never worked with image processing before, but it sounded like a good challenge, so I dived into it. ...

I’m sure for most of you it’s not a surprise, but I also think that there are people out there who either doesn’t know what it is or simply tends to forget about it. The aim of this article is to show these people what it is and why should they use it. So, what is RenderScript? RenderScript is an Android framework which can be used for running computationally heavy tasks at high performance. You will get the most benefit on using it for tasks which require a lot of computation that can be parallelized, as the framework will run your code on every available CPU and GPU cores. ...

Write once, use everywhere Sooner or later every developer meets the following scenario: you have written the same piece of code multiple times, maybe with some minor differences, and you don’t want to do it again. You analyze the situation and decide to create a separate function so the next time you need it you just have to call it. Sometimes it’s not enough so you create a new abstraction layer and write a class which does what you need. But what happens if you cannot create an abstraction which is suitable for you and it’s easy to use whenever you need it. That’s when Annotation Processing comes for your help. ...

What are contracts? In the world of Kotlin, contracts represent a deal between the developer and the compiler. As a developer you can share insight of your code with the compiler and it can use this extra info for better code analysis. Currently there are two kinds of contracts available: callsInPlace which tells the compiler how many times a lambda is called, and returns/implies which indicates that a defined condition is true if the function returns a specific value. ...