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Olly Betts: The Art of Writing Small Programs - OSDC 2011

10mo ago
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My first computer had 1KB of RAM, and when I finally got it upgraded to 4KB the possibilities seemed endless! At university, I coauthored what is probably the world's smallest tetris program - one line of BBC BASIC, 256 bytes in all. These days I have a laptop which has six million times more RAM than that first computer, and my work involves billions of times more data than it could process. Yet I believe some of the lessons learned from those resource-constrained days are still useful - come along and let's see if I can convince anybody else of this. Olly Betts makes a living as a freelance free software developer and consultant, working mostly on search-related projects using Xapian. He is originally from the UK, but now lives near Wellington, New Zealand. Check out http://2011.OSDC.com.au/THEA for more information.