This is one of those things that newbie game programmers seem to underestimate, frequently.
And when I say “newbie” I include “experienced, skilled programmers with 10+ years of coding experience – but who haven’t yet shipped a game of their *own*”.
(e.g. I’ve seen a couple of studios that started as Digital Agencies, or as Animation Studios, etc – that then transitioned to writing their own games. This is the kind of thing that they often struggle with. Not for lack of skill or general programming experience, but for lack of the domain-specific experience of game coding)

Despite the dramatic shift toward simplification in software interfaces, the world of development tools continues to shrink our workspace with feature after feature in every release. Even with all of these things at our disposal, we're stuck in a world of files and forced organization - why are we still looking all over the place for the things we need when we're coding? Why is everything just static text?

Bret Victor hinted at the idea that we can do much better than we are now - we can provide instant feedback, we can show you how your changes affect a system. And I discovered he was right.

We can do better, and to that end, let me introduce you to

Harmattan API Showcase application showcases the key APIs of the MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan API offering. The showcase application utilizes APIs with QML bindings as much as possible, but falls back to using C++ code when there's no QML API available for a particular functionality. The demonstrated APIs include system information, messaging, NFC, location, multimedia, camera, sensors, etc. To help application developers with their application development for Nokia N9, source code of showcase application is available here - zip or tar.gz . And here is the debian package.

This is the story of Candystall, the winner of the Assembly 2007 4k intro competition. In this article, we describe the ideas that eventually led to the intro as it came to be, and the tools we created along the way to assist in the process.

Android fragmentation is a huge problem. The fact that there are hundreds of different hardware devices running over half a dozen different versions of Google’s OS makes it annoying for users, but makes it an especially devastating issue for developers trying to make a business out of the Android ecosystem.

A WPF enthusiast on twitter is building an application. They noticed that the images they were using looked like crap in the toolbar. We checked, and it wasn't an issue of SnapToDevicePixels or UseLayoutRounding. Nope, this was something else. So I asked him to send me the whole project. Turns out the tiny toolbar images are actually 512x512 32 bit PNGs. While resizing those should definitely be on the To Do list for this app, depending on how the images are used, I thought I'd at least figure out how to fix the display.

HTML5 is hot.  The echo chamber is loud and everywhere you turn; blogs, social media, trade magazines, and corporations, are heralding it as the silver-bullet for everything—and more. It’s magical.

But what is the current reality of HTML5 for Advertising Agencies and their Digital Production partners? And what does it mean for those concepting and developing real client campaigns with real business goals? The question isn’t “Is Flash Dead?” But rather “What’s the best solution to this problem?” Both HTML5 and Flash are amazing solutions to our web executions, each with their own pros and cons.

I’ll preface this by saying that yes, I’m running Google Chrome Beta as my main browser, and yes, some bugs are to be expected from running a beta browser. That’s besides the point. So what am I complaining about?

Any small bug on any browser can instantly kill a product you’ve worked months or years on.

QNeptunea family is twitter client frontend powered by twitter4qml https://gitorious.org/twitter4qml

The WebSocket protocol has applications beyond plain vanilla web development.  I will explain how the protocol works, how to implement your own server and share some insights I had along the way. Before we get down and dirty, I will explain what I’ve been doing with it.

ROM Hacks make the process of developing a functional Sonic game with unique art, enemies, and modifications much easier, since the game engine and basic mechanics are already functional. However, if the game requires a different game engine, modifying existing low-level assembly may be inappropriate, and some game designers might choose to program their own unique game engine. The physics of a game engine are rules that describe how to transform the player's input (either in the form of buttons, keyboard, or even a mouse if the designer feels inclined) into appropriate changes in the position of the sprites in the game (such as the Sonic sprite, or alternatively, how enemy sprites will respond). These physics guides will hopefully make the process of simulating the rules used in Sonic games easier.

Since the rules themselves are independent of how they are implemented, many people choose programming languages such as Java, C, C++, Python, or a Lisp dialect to implement game physics. In addition, people can choose to use more specialized applications like Flash, Game Maker, or a Clickteam program like Multimedia Fusion 2.

Hopefully, these guides will provide adequate information to facilitate implementation.

Last summer, I had the good fortune to visit a “very advanced” Agile shop. These folks really did embrace agile methods with a discipline, completeness, and a zealous fervor that would be hard to match. In many ways, they could have been a poster child for Agile methods...But these weren’t productive developers freed from mindless process dogma. They were Agile slaves. The dogma they followed was ours, and they followed it well. And as with many organizations in a similar position, they saw some promising results. Continuous integration, refactoring, unit tests, pair programming—all these techniques yielded some benefit. But they weren’t thinking, they weren’t reacting, they weren’t being agile. When problems came up, they addressed them with all the grace and elegance of a deer caught in the terrifying blaze of alien headlights. They knew how to do Agile; they didn’t know how to be agile.

The sarcasm in this talk does not represent anyone's actual opinion. For a more serious take on software, try Destroy All Software Screencasts: 10 to 15 minutes weekly, dense with information on advanced topics like Unix, TDD, OO Design, Vim, Ruby, and Git.

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities

This Qt Quick/Qt C++ example application demonstrates how to use Qt Mobility Service Framework. The example has been divided into two parts: a daemon service and a client UI that interacts with the daemon. The daemon service tracks the user's GPS location and can be used to sent it to an other user requesting the location.

I assume due to the way the store works we have to package everything into one deb? But I have no idea how to do that. I've got two projects in qt creator -- one for the c++ daemon and one for the QML UI. Any hints?

It's all in the title. Shake2skip lets you skip the current song in harmattan music player by shaking the phone sideways. Here is a short demo.

Daemons, also known as background applications or services, are applications that are launched at device startup and do not feature a UI or require other direct user input. They perform a defined operation and are usually launched at predefined times or in response to events on the device. Common usages for daemons include e-mail handler applications and monitoring tools, among others.

A short while ago, I discovered that Wii Fit could be used to track my progress as I walked on a treadmill. Wii Fit has a game where you jog in place in front of your TV to travel through a virtual landscape. Instead of bouncing up and down on the floor, I put my wiimote in my pocket, hopped on the treadmill and had a much better virtual exercise experience. And of course this got me thinking: if the wii can track movement, why can't the iPhone do the same?

QML doesn't provide any API to access local files. Same story for Javascript, which is a language designed to run in web browsers and that natively doesn't provide any API, for security reasons, to access local files. The Qt documentation explains how to read/write files by using QML plugins. Anyway, accessing the code is a bit tricky and therefore I´ve written a small application which explains in few code lines how to achieve this target without using QML plugins.

Qt Quick Components provides ready made building blocks to develop great looking Graphical User Interfaces for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.
The aim of this article is to introduce developers with this components, possible usages and code samples. Thus acting as a quick starter.

This list contains links to various information sources useful for (not only) Harmattan development.

When Nokia came out with MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan they released some Nokia specific APIs so that all applications that run on their phones could have the same outer look and feel. The way they pulled this off was introduce Page, PageStack, PageStackWindow and PageStackWindowStyle elements.

Many mobile devices today come with a series of sensors. Examples of functionality that sensors provide are orientation flips, location tracking, and games that are controlled by moving the device.

This article explains how to how to use ToolIcon and it’s various predefined icons in ToolBarLayout QML Element for MeeGo Harmattan.

Anyone with sales release Nokia N9 device can build, test and deploy their own applications to it directly from Qt Creator. Harmattan Platform SDK is available for download.

We’ve heard a lot of interest from folks we’ve talked to in the tech community and at conferences about our Continuous Deployment process at IMVU, and how we push code up to 50 times a day. We’ve also received some questions about how we do this without introducing regressions and new bugs into our product, and how we approach Quality Assurance in this fast-paced environment.

Below, you'll find two videos: one about the lab, and one containing a case study of the team at work. Watch them both. If you have questions, JB has generously agreed to make himself available to answer them in a future post. Just leave your question as a comment to this post. If there's sufficient interest, we'll expand this MVP.

The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point. Give your team 1 point for each "yes" answer. The bummer about The Joel Test is that you really shouldn't use it to make sure that your nuclear power plant software is safe.

A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, and they need serious help, because companies like Microsoft run at 12 full-time. 

I was employee #20 at the first start-up and the first engineering lead. Over the course of two years, the team and the company exploded to close to 200 employees. This is when I discovered that growing rapidly teaches you one thing well: how communication continually finds new and interesting ways to break down. The core issue being the folks who’ve been around longer who also tend to have more responsibility. As far as they’re concerned, the ways they organically communicated before will remain as efficient and simple each time the group doubles in size.

They don’t. A growing group needs to continually invest in new ways to figure out what it is collectively thinking so anyone anywhere can answer the question: “What the hell is going on?” This is the first question The Rands Test answers. As I’ll explain shortly, the second question The Rands Test helps you answer is selfish. The second asks: “Where am I?”

This is my little space for tutorials, papers and code for computer graphics, fractals and demoscene. I don't store the demos and other finalized works here anymore, I moved them to the vanilla page. Also, if you are looking for something and you don't find it here, go try my main site, perhapse you have more luck there. The content in this site have been written in the last ten years or more, and you can imagine it continues growing and growing. Yep, I try my best to upload the new material and keep it all up to date, but it's not easy since both the content of everything you see here and the site itself are made during my spare time. Also, note I'm neither native English speaker nor I do really spend long time writing the text.... so I'm really sorry for that. Yet I hope you enjoy it!

NFC (Near Field Communications) is an exciting new contactless technology designed to provide countless opportunities for innovative, effective marketing.

Your customers simply “tap” an NFC enabled mobile against a poster that contains a small a tag.

The tag contains the info you’ve programmed it with so whether you want to get more Facebook likes or send people to your website, one small tap can have a massive impact.

Game Developer Magazine

Let me tell you a secret. I don't fix databases. I fix applications.

Companies hire me to "fix the database" because they think it's the source of their performance and downtime problems. This is very rarely the case. Failure to scale is almost always the result of poor management decisions — often a series of them. In fact, these anti-scaling decisions are so often repeated that they have become anti-patterns.

I did a little talk about these anti-patterns at the last MySQL Conference and Expo. Go watch it and then come on back. Now that you've seen the five-minute version (and hopefully laughed at it), you're ready for some less sarcastic detail which explains how to recognize these anti-patterns and how to avoid them.

In June 2010, as the world waited for news on the release of Portal2, Valve announced that making games is hard.  Everyone inside the industry knows this, but to gamers and journalists alike this seemed to come as a surprise. Partly because of disappointment that a game they were looking forward to wasn’t coming out for a bit longer, and partly because Valve is an industry leader. For them to put their hands up and say “hey, this ain’t so easy” made people think: “if they find it hard, what about everybody else?”.

Well, yup, everybody else finds it hard as well. But why? Surely we just take the last game we made and stick some new levels and graphics in it? Or just sit around all day playing the game until one day we decide to release it?

Unfortunately, it’s not like that at all. But why not?

I’m starting to realize that most of my blog posts begin with me making excuses about something as well as linking to somebody else’s post or article. Spoiler alert, today will be no different. The excuse is that this post is not my follow-up to my last one about my initial adventures with off-screen particles, due to a lack of time to work on it while moving into a new place and also some disappointing results with mixed resolution rendering. So what I’m talking about instead is my experiences with interviewing for programming intern positions throughout this past Spring. A while back, Jaymin did a great post about programming tests and demos, but I feel like I might have some insights for aspiring entry-level game developers.

Since it’s quite a long time after GDC 2011 and I never found the time to do a proper conference report, I thought I’d at least do a link roundup.

Eve Online's players are a notoriously dedicated, and vociferous, bunch. Self-governing, focused and regularly taking part in huge interstellar fleet battles, meeting their expectations presents a daunting challenge to any AI programmer. We sat down with CCP Games senior programmer, Joel McGinnis, to discuss the difference between real and observed artificial intelligence, why MMOG developer's tend to push AI to the bottom of the to-do list and what we can expect from game AI in the future.

This is a free, community driven Q&A for professional and independent game developers. It is a part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A websites, and it was created through the open democratic process defined at Stack Exchange Area 51.

On February 11th, one of the giants of the mobile world gave up control of their own fate and put it into the hands of Microsoft, the desktop software behemoth that has never managed to get a solid foothold in mobile. How did that happen? Did it really have to happen? What will be the results of this bizzare marriage?

Last week, I published a piece on Gerrit and Jenkins about how I saw the future of distributed development teams. It got a fair number of views and positive comments (both off- and on-line) so I followed through with my promise to record a demo of using all the systems together.

This uses Gerrit, combined with Jenkins CI and the Gerrit Trigger Plugin. I skipped on explaining how to set this up in the video, preferring to show how it's used so to get a feel of how it all fits together. If there's interest, I might do a subsequent demo on getting started with Gerrit and Jenkins, taking about the installation steps needed. But without further ado, here's the video:

Facebook has released the getBalance API call as an incentive to game developers who use Facebook Credits as their exclusive premium in-game currency. The call lets developers determine the Facebook Credits balance of any of their users. This allows them to identify high rollers with a large balance of Credits and dynamically price virtual goods to increase purchase probability or profit margin, improving monetization.

With the open source recommendation engine easyrec you can add recommendations to your website within minutes. easyrec is a web application written in Java that provides personalized recommendations using RESTful Web Services ready to be integrated in your web enabled applications. easyrec is...

Few days back I had connected labs.9lessons application to twitter API via OAuth (open protocal secure authorization). In this post I want to explain how to store twitter oauth_token and secret values in to database and how to update status with your own web application.

Startups in stealth mode need one piece of advice.
Just Stop.
As in stop being in stealth mode. Stop asking for advice. Stop doing your start-up. You're not ready.
You're a naive-bullshiter.

In Scrum workshops, I often ask developers if they have ever compared the game that they last shipped against the original design document. The usual answer is that, except for the title, much of the design changed during development.

I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software.

Signing Up For A Forum Nokia Account Mobile Application usability on the N8 – Part A Mobile Application usability on the N8 – Part B Mobile Application usability on the N8 – Part C Mobile Application usability on the N8 – Part D Getting Started with Qt Overview of Qt Creator Using Qt Creator to Design Your First Applicataion What is Qt QMake, Widgets and Widget Layouts Signals and slots Strings, Files and Streams Main windows and Dialogs Qt Designer Qt Mobility – Part A Qt Mobility – Part B Qt Mobility – Part C Qt Mobility – Part D

Facebook engineers decide what they want to work on and are allowed to make changes across the site without asking for permission.

This page presents all the articles in the Forum Nokia Wiki that include the category Qt (including Qt for Symbian, Qt for Maemo, Qt Quick and Qt Mobility). If new to Qt technology, besides the information presented here, check also the Qt Technology Landing Page in Forum Nokia.

Contribute, new or improve existing ones, topical "Qt" ("Qt for Symbian" and "Qt for Maemo") articles, tutorials, how to's and code examples to make this section live and truly valuable.

As I've said before, good UI and readable, maintainable code don't mix. But lately I've been inspired to revisit this topic, because it's an idea that has been popping up in other venues as well

Sigurd has 4 applications in Marketplace, with various levels of success, and it is his most recent app which has seen the most attention, garnering more than 50,000 downloads in 23 days, and reaching a Marketplace rank of 8, with an average of 2274 downloads per day.
The other apps have not fared as well, but what is interesting is the rapid drop-off when going from position 8 with 2300 downloads per day, to position 49 with only 330 downloads per day.

I was trying to communicate to management that server developers have different priorities than game developers. As a means to show the importance of laying in administrative infrastructure, and other software engineering "overhead", I put this list together. Hope it helps you to think about making the right investment in making the system sustainable, and make those points to the powers that be.

I'm reading Do More Faster, which is more than a bit of an advertisement for the TechStars start-up incubator, but it's a good read nonetheless. What struck me is that several of the people who went through the program, successfully enough to at least get initial funding, didn't know how to program. They learned it so they could implement their start-up ideas.

I'm primarily a server programmer, but I still end up doing UI work every once in a while, and that's been true for the majority of the last three weeks. Not being an experienced old hand at UI design, I find myself falling back on first principles and decade-old books. I'm mostly happy with the results, but the code that results in implementing the interface... well, it's not the kind of code that I like to write.

Within the MMOG industry there are two primary server structures employed to house the player base: Separated shards of some sort (typically referred to as 'servers' though this is misleading from a hardware standpoint) and a more unified, single-world structure. Primary examples of each are World of Warcraft, which employs a shard-based structure that breaks its considerable population into separate worlds, and EVE Online which houses its entire player base in a single universe.

It took an entire day to get In-App purchases to work.  TOTALLY unnecessary.  Apple’s docs on the subject are worthless, so I figure it’s time for another Coding Help Blog Post

One of the features available to iOS developers when creating iPhone or iPad applications is the ability to sell items within their application (called In App Purchases).

In many cases, the In App Purchase will be fulfilled by downloading data from a third-party server. Before the iOS application can download the purchased item, the third-party server must check with Apple to ensure the item has been successfully purchased.

The following diagram demonstrates how this works in principle.

Joe Bork has written a great article explaining some of the decisions that go into whether a bug is fixed or not. This means that I can cross that one off my list of potential future entries. Thanks Joe!

But while I'm at it, I'd like to expand a little on what Joe said.His comments generalize to more than just bug fixes. A bug fix is one kind of change to the behaviour of the product, and all changes have similar costs and go through a similar process.

Programming is hard. It's harder than you think. Right now you're probably underestimating the amount of frustration and discomfort you're about to experience, without realizing that by doing so you're creating all sorts of subtle barriers to obtaining a deep understanding of programming.

What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea). Other sites, like Gamedev and Gamasutra, cover lots more topics than mine does. These are the topics I cover:

As I work towards completing my own game, I’ve been thinking a lot about finishing projects in general. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of really talented developers out there that have trouble finishing games. Truthfully, I’ve left a long trail of unfinished games in my wake… I think everyone has. Not every project is going to pan out, for whatever reason. But if you find yourself consistently backing out of game projects that have a lot of potential, it could be worth taking a step back and examining why this happens.

this post is a largely non-technical discussion about technical issues. It’s mainly written for the shoppers and sellers on Etsy, but I’m posting it on our engineering blog because I think engineers might be interested.

This is a time-lapse look at Markus “Minecraft” Persson’s Ludum Dare 18 entry – a “game in a weekend” competition. As with many of the competitors, it’s dang impressive what was accomplished in only 48 hours of development time.

Most micro-ISVs use a serial number/registration code system to allow end users to unlock or activate their purchase.  The problem most of us have run into is that a few days or weeks after our software is released, someone has developed a keygen, a crack, or has leaked a serial number across the internet.

There are several possible solutions to this problem. You could license a system like Armadillo/Software Passport or ASProtect, or you could distribute a separate full version as a download for your paying customers. Each option has advantages and disadvantages. What I am going to show you is a way to keep “rolling your own” license key system while making working cracks harder for crackers to produce, and working keygens a thing of the past.

You’re not alone, I was also doing prototyping wrong until a few years ago. There are probably many different ways of prototyping games correctly, and maybe your way works great for you. In that case, a more accurate title for this post could have been “Prototyping: I Was Doing It Wrong”.

A good game prototype is something fast/cheap that allows you to answer a specific question about your game. The key points there are fast/cheap and specific question. It’s not a level of a game, it’s not a “vertical slice”, and it’s certainly not an engine for the game.

Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold gave one of the best presentations on the subject of rapid prototyping. It was hugely influential for me, and it made me re-think the way I do prototypes. If you get a chance, find the audio for the presentation, it’s definitely worth it.

[In this much-referenced technical piece originally published in Game Developer magazine late last year, the team behind idiosyncratic MMO success EVE Online discusses precisely why sharing a single world between all of its players makes sense.]

You’ve been depressed for like a year now, I know. All the hardcore Objective-C developers have been having a hay-day writing apps for the iPhone. You might have even tried reading a tutorial or two about developing for the iPhone, but its C—or a form of it—and it’s really hard to learn.

This blog post is about the bright side of software piracy. It's about the times when not only is it OK to steal my games, but, in fact, I get something out of it. Perhaps an unusual topic for a blog post from a game developer.

Why start this site?

Well, I believe that game developers are interesting, and have a lot to say. I also know that a lot of them keep blogs. But I don't think they promote them, and I don't think they are too easy to find. The reason that I think this is because I have too often seen people ask the question "does anyone know any decent developer blogs?"

Welcome to another edition of Guru Speak. I believe that one of the hallmarks of a good writer is the ability to mold a complex topic into something both palatable and interesting. These are the characteristics I strive for in Guru Speak, and I hope you consider my efforts to be a success. Please be sure to let me know what issues tend to trouble you the most or in what areas you would like to expand your knowledge and understanding. I am happy to cater to my readers.

This edition's topic is storing sessions in a database.

This paper explains the design architecture, implementation, and some of the lessons learned creating the multiplayer (networking) code for the Age of Empires 1 & 2 games; and discusses the current and future networking approaches used by Ensemble Studios in its game engines.

daniel 'sirleto' renkel
independent game developer
technical artist
programmer
designer

bachelor of computer science
living in darmstadt, germany
born 1980 as a leo

I joined Etsy back in February and knew immediately that there would be no shortage of technical challenges. Many of our job postings for Engineering positions describe the company as a place “where the word ‘millions’ is used frequently and in many contexts”. I got a taste of that within my first weeks on the job. We are in the process of redesigning a few of the major sections around etsy.com. Every item being sold on the site can have up to five photos posted with it. When a seller uploads a new photo, it’s resized automatically into six different sizes that are displayed throughout the site. As we redesigned some pages we realized we would need to replace a few of the existing image sizes.

You’re a programmer. Have you ever wondered how multiplayer games work? From the outside it seems magical: two or more players sharing a consistent experience across the network like they actually exist together in the same virtual world. But as programmers we know the truth of what is actually going on underneath is quite different from what you see. It turns out that it’s all an illusion. A massive sleight-of-hand. What you perceive as a shared reality is only an approximation unique to your own point of view and place in time.

XPath is used to navigate through elements and attributes in an XML document.

XPath is a major element in W3C's XSLT standard - and XQuery and XPointer are both built on XPath expressions.

It doesn’t account for database-specific syntax, but can allow for the process of switching databases and platforms to be fairly painless, simply by switching the connection string in many instances.

This tutorial isn’t meant to be a complete how-to on SQL. It’s written primarily for people currently using the mysql or mysqli extension to help them make the jump to the more portable and powerful PDO.

PHP makes it easy to write scripts that access databases, enabling you to create dynamic web pages that incorporate database content. PHP includes several specialized database-access interfaces that take the form of separate sets of functions for each database system. There is one set for MySQL, another for InterBase, another for PostgreSQL, and so forth. However, having a different set of functions for each database makes PHP scripts non-portable at the lexical (source code) level. For example, the function for issuing an SQL statement is named mysql_query(), ibase_query(), or pg_exec(), depending on whether you are using MySQL, InterBase, or PostgreSQL.

Lots of people want to know the answer to that question. Most indie games fail. Most indie projects never get completed. I don’t have any way to prove that, but any indie game veterans will know it’s true. Here are my top tips. Some of them may seem like they de-motivate, rather than motivate, but I get motivated by knowing how important and serious it is for me to work hard. Most indies don’t realise how hard they are going to have to work, and how good their game has to be.

Last week a great blog post, followed by a seemingly innocuous tweet from @mysterycoconut, escalated into what is now known as iDevBlogADay. The concept is fairly straightforward; Every day a developer (or two) will post on their blog. We all have an allotted day so that there is at least one blog post published every day of the week. @mysterycoconut has done a great job of organising it with the #idevblogaday hashtag, a twitter list for the participants, and even an aggregated RSS feed of all the blogs. There’s a wide variety of developers joining in – Scroll to the bottom of this page to see the roster.