Another Dev's Two Cents

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Nish Tahir

Principal Software Engineer. I write about engineering and fun projects I work on.

📍 🌎 https://social.nishtahir.com/@nish

Quick tip: Quickly parse and filter data with regex find and replace

Dealing with data is sometimes a pain in the rear end. It typically comes full of unwanted extras that can be a pain to filter out by hand. One of the most common ways of dealing with this is to write some kind of script which is time consuming or

Trying out BASIC

A little while ago, Usborne released some of their classic 80s programming books for free[1]. While it may not a have been a complete collection, it's still pretty cool to be able to experience such an elegant piece of computer science history. The books were aimed at

Automate programming the MSP430 Launchpad on Linux using Expect

Programming and debugging the MSP430 on Windows is a bit of a straight forward affair. You simply install the Code Composer Studio (CCS) integrated development environment (IDE) and in a few minutes you are ready to go. On Linux systems however, there is a little bit of work involved[1]

Hands on with Tales from the Borderlands

Let me just get this out of the way: I'm a huge fan of the Borderlands series and it's not hard to see why. Borderlands is a huge open world role playing game (RPG) with lots to do, plenty of psychos to shoot and, all the

Setting up for Android NDK development

Android allows you to compile and execute native code written in C/C++ for increased computational performance. Getting the NDK up and running on the other hand can be a pain. This tutorial was put together using Android Studio 1.4.1 with the most recent API version 23. I&

Hands on with Braid

So i've recently been trying to scratch things off my bucket list. Running through my remarkably small steam library I happened across Braid. I purchased the game at a friends recommendation after being told it would "literally change your life"[1]. At first glance, Braid looks

Low power interactions with the MSP430 Launchpad push button

So lately i've been doing a lot of programming on the Texas Instrument (TI) MSP430 and launchpad development board[1]. It's been quite interesting programming so close to the hardware. There is a lot of power in being able directly manipulate the behavior of the CPU,

Writing better comments

We are all familiar with some kind of concept of writing good code[1] and how extremely difficult it is to write in situations where deadlines exist (you don't have time to think things out. So naturally you cut corners and make compromises). Things get a bit more

Up and running with Maven

If you've been programming for a while, you probably already know what it's like putting together large projects. There is usually a lot of pain and confusion involved in downloading libraries, frameworks and modules - We are all familiar with the saying - don't

Why you shouldn't use the double brace initializer

I recently came across something I never really considered doing in my code- using instance initializers to instantiate collections. This seemed like a good idea at first seeing how there hasn't really been a convenient way of instantiating and initializing collections without having to manually populate the list.