With COVID-19 creating a lot of free time for folks, I thought I would host a few classes on writing software. Since that is a big part of my job as an engineer, I figured this might be a good way to pass my newfound free time. I’ll be using my blog to host the content and I’ll be live streaming the videos starting at 1 pm on April 20th. Each tutorial will last around an hour and it will be very informal. I expect this to run for at least a week, maybe longer.
My goal is to make this content as accessible as possible. Some background knowledge on computers will be helpful, but I’ll try to cover everything. I’ll be watching comments and try and answer questions.
I will focus on using Microsoft Visual Studio Community Edition, since I expect most folks to be running Windows. If there is interest, I’m happy to share the Linux side of things. This isn’t really a scripted class, so some times we might run into issues and bugs together. That’s part of developing software!
Here is a rough plan of the first few topics:
- Day 1: “Hello World” – Getting a project to build and basic functionality
- Day 2: “Pointers” – What they are and why they aren’t so bad
- Day 3: “C++ vs C” – Why it’s important to have some class
- Day 4: “Networking” – How to send and receive data
- Day 5: “Multi-Threading” – If 1 is good, 2 is better; right?
If you have topics or ideas for week 2, feel free to send them via the contact page. I have some ideas around using C/C++ on LEGO robots, maybe some GPU computing, other programming languages. Let me know what interests you!
I’ll be making a new post for each video. Video will be left on YouTube for you to watch later and reference and all code will be pushed to github.
If you are looking for some reference books, both of these are very good, even though they are older.
Milluzzi Labs 