Nicolás Brailovsky

Yes, this is the post number 200 on this blog. Considering we are a month away of starting the fourth year, I guess that gives me quite a lousy periodicity, but I am still surprised I post somewhat regularly here after such a long time (hey, in programmer years that’s like a whole life!).

Since the beginning this blog has mutated from being  my public notepad to being a place where I research new topics, or write about things that are generally interesting to me. I lost many readers for posting crazy metaprogramming stuff and for constantly babbling about Vim and Linux, but hey, I’m proud of if. Let’s see what the next 200 posts bring here.

Long time without updates. I guess I needed vacations from the blog. It was not the first time and it probably won’t be the last one I take, but I’m back now with another truckload of C++ ramblings and misc stuff. Like this one:

It’s been a long time since I used the metapost category. I’ve been taking a look at the queries received by Google for which this blogs shows up. Some of them are quite peculiar, some of them may give us an insight of what the search engine things of me. For example:

There was a long list of variations to these phrases, but I didn’t want such a long post. Anyway, if you thought that grumpy is all Google considers me to be, brace yourself for a surprise:

Basically, a computer using trained-troll monkey, with no life. Pretty accurate, some people may say.

Literally signal of death in Spanish. Tip: Lack of pulse.

Another common search:

I guess those searches have a very low returning rate.

This is a query which sincerely surprised me:

I’ll do a public service here: it’s written ‘elephant’, buddy.

From http://i.imgur.com/annBL.jpg

I forgot but one thing about these posts: the titles. No one got the hint but they are all chapter names from one of my favorites series, Nowhere Man.

This is the end. My only reader, the end. After 15 chapters of template metaprogramming you should have learned why staying away from them is a good idea, but if you have been following this series then you should know now when and why they could be useful.

These posts were a compendium of mostly isolated data I found during my travels through the depths of metaprogramming tricks, there are books and people much more capable than me if you want to learn more about this subject (Modern C++ Design by Andrei Alexandrescu comes to mind).

The whole idea of having a cache and a virtual template method was nice, but after seeing the result I decided it was best to have a factory method and an IDL. It may not be so l33t, but whoever has to maintain the code after me will be grateful.

This is the last post on this topic because I feel I have written most, if not everything, I can transmit through this medium but also for an important reason, most likely I won’t be working with C++ code so much from now on [1] so there won’t be as many chances for me to see the dark, insane, side of this beautiful (in its own way) programming language in a programming language. I know most of you must have barely skimmed through these articles, but I still hope you enjoyed them.

[1] That’s right, I’m leaving C++ for the dark side of development, I’ll be working with Java from now on. Keep in mind this article may have been written a long time before it’s published.

[2] Wow, it was a long time since I used the meta-post category

I’m polishing my latest talk, “Ninja console” which will be made available to the public soon. More news to come.