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Month: March 2019

What is the difference between Application Programming vs System Programming?

Published by James Higgins on 2019-03-07

Low level infrastructure software (aka system programming) is what makes up the foundation of operating systems and development platforms. This type of software requires machine code that runs directly on the CPU and can effectively communicate directly with the various hardware components. The end users of software built using system programming is mostly technical people and other programmers.

The vast majority of developers working today write applicaiton code. Application programming is the practice of building software that runs on an operating system or runtime platform. Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS and web browsers are examples of platforms that applications are built on. Application code doesn’t interface directly with hardware, instead it relies upon the OS / platform to provide all the required services. Applications are built for end users and business people who may possess little if any technical knowledge.

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Blender is pretty cool

Published by James Higgins on 2019-03-03

I first played around with 3D modeling and rendering way back on the Commodore Amiga. That cool little computer was ahead of its time. Messed around with 3D Studio Max years ago while building a game engine for Cyberdyne Interactive. But haven’t given it any thought in at least a decade.

I love my OOriginal Coder logo and wanted to get a 3D version of it. My skills are way out of date and last I checked a decent 3D system was a couple thousand dollars so I hired someone to create a 3D model and render it. In the middle of that I discovered Blender. Its an extremely capable full blown 3D modeling, animation and rendering system that is completely free. This thing has way more features than the old version of 3D Studio Max I used years ago.

The 3D model I got back of my 2D logo was pretty good but I didn’t like the angles and lighting on the rendered images. So I tossed the model into Blender and rendered my own output. Took me less than 30 minutes to watch a quick YouTube tutorial, setup the scene and render it. My modeling skills still suck but now I know that if I ever want to mess around with 3D I could do it for free without having to sacrifice capabilities.

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Now I’ve done it. I’ve gone and started a blog.

Published by James Higgins on 2019-03-03

This (dreaded?) day has finally arrived. I’ve started my own blog. More than that, I’ve started a “professional blog”. Which means this is going to take work. While I find writing C# professionally fun the idea of having to write English prose as work doesn’t sound appealing.

Sure, I’ve thought about doing this numerous times over the years. I kinda feels like at my experience level I’m rather expected to have a blog. Long ago I did have a LiveJournal that I posted to regularly. That used to be a thing, if you never heard of it that should indicate how long ago that was.

On the bright side I am passionate about and do love software development. I have an insanely large amount of experience and have worked on a wide array of systems spanning the entire spectrum of scale. And I care about software development and producing the very best architectures and code possible for any given situation. So maybe having a blog won’t be so bad.

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Welcome to my blog!

Published by James Higgins on 2019-03-01

I’ll mostly be posting about software architecture & development since that’s what I know best. There will also be some posts about IT, the cloud, the Internet and similar stuff. Occasionally I may toss in a piece of trivia or a quote. If you have thoughts, ideas or questions please leave a comment!

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