How Have AI/LLM Coding Tools Impacted Software Development? The emergence of AI systems (as we will also refer to as Large Language Model/LLM tools) in the 2020s is one of the biggest, unanticipated, game changers in software development (and virtually every field). For decades AI research plodded along, making incremental progress with occasional practical breakthroughs,[…]
LAN-LOK: The Antarctic DOS Sabotage Game Lost for 34 Years (Part 1) An exercise in reconstructing (and maybe modernizing) history. AlphaPixel often gets called upon to work on legacy codebases, sometimes VERY legacy. We have contact with code from the 80s and 90s on a regular basis, in a variety of dialects and languages, and[…]
Mercenary Programming: the AlphaPixel way Most software shops call themselves consultants. We call ourselves Mercenary Programmers. We are a rapid-response, air-dropped strike team. We show up when things are on fire, fix what’s broken, and leave without creating a dependency on us. No politics, ramp-up theater or six-week discovery phase. We are senior developers who[…]
Top 10 Technical Papers From SIGGRAPH 2025 Vancouver (with paper links) We keep a close eye on the cutting edge of graphics research so we can bring the freshest ideas into our projects and keep our clients informed. The annual Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH) 2025 conference took place in
clang-format Style Guide Matrix and Summaries Have you ever tried to make sense of clang-format’s dozens of style options? Or tried to remember which one actually controls that one spacing quirk? Most guides out there just show examples without summarizing why one choice differs from another. We created a table that lines up the formatting
Shader Basics: Go from a Color Gradient to an Animated Mandelbrot in a GPU Shader in One Lesson To play with shaders, go to https://www.shadertoy.com/ and click “New” in the upper right (you can also create an account if you want to save your work as you play). It creates a new basic shader. void
The definitive word on how to force selection of a discrete GPU in C/C++ code.
In part 5 of our raytracing port, we clean up the code a bit and then add camera/viewport animation and a checkerboard ground texture.
In part 4 of our raytracer porting blog, we fix the SDL event pump, add a PNG saver with libspng, remove the preset resolution limits and add a unit test using CTest.
In our OpenCV camera calibration tutorial, we show how to get started with OpenCV by setting up the software, printing and capturing a calibration chessboard, and then calibrate the camera using the captured images.
