"Learn IT, Girl!" mentorship program just started!

This week is official beginning of "Learn IT, Girl!" program [1]. It's international program for woman, started by a few girls from Poland and Romania, invented at the Google Anita Borg Scholarship [2] retreat in 2014. A main aim is to learn by women particular programming language. Every scholar is guided by her own mentor, who helps her. Girls learn language by doing selected earlier project (which must be open-source project ofc).

I take a part in this program as a mentor, and my my mentee is Corina Teodorescu. She's from Romania and studies Marketing. Corina has decided to learn C#, and she's going to write an mobile app for phones with Android OS. Because of a lot really great ideas, she doesn't finally choose her project. She's choosing between RSS reader and application for downloading/uploading/hash-tagging images - she didn't make a decision, but I think, both are quite useful, and Corina can learn a lot by making one of them(what's the most important during this program :)

Program takes 3 months, and I believe, that would be great time for Corina and for me as well. I hope, Corina will learn a lot, and I'm going to improve my teaching skills too. We will have fun for sure :)

 Wish me and Corina luck!

Links
[1] https://sites.google.com/site/learnitgirl/
[2] http://www.google.com/anitaborg/

Simple macro for measuring algorithm's running time

Recently I'm spending a lot of time on my master's thesis. I'm working on algorithm for automatic number plates recognition using image segmentation. I'm trying to achieve high performance, so I need to measure execution time of my algorithms.
A few weeks ago I've written about google benchmark [1]. It's quite powerful library, and it's easy to use even in simple case, but sometimes we don't want to depend on an external library. So is it in my case too.
I've created simple macro for measuring running time:

#include <chrono>

#define MEASURE_TIME(unit, ...)    \
  [&] {         \
    using namespace std::chrono;     \
    auto start = high_resolution_clock::now ();    \
    __VA_ARGS__;       \
    auto time = high_resolution_clock::now () - start;   \
    return duration_cast<unit> (time).count ();    \
  } ();

Arguments:

• unit - std::chrono::duration time interval. You can simply pass defined in standard library types, e.g. predefined types:
  • std::chrono::nanoseconds
  • std::chrono::microseconds
  • std::chrono::milliseconds
  • std::chrono::seconds
  • std::chrono::minutes
  • std::chrono::hours
• ... - code for measurement

And example usage:

  int value = 0;

  auto duration = MEASURE_TIME(std::chrono::milliseconds, 
    int arg0, arg1;
    arg0 = run_time_consuming_algorithm ();
    arg1 = run_another_one(arg0);
    value = run_third_algorithm(arg1);
  );

  cout << "Execution time: " << duration << std::endl
       << "Computed value: " << value;

Note, that you can use earlier declared values (value variable, in my case), because all the values are captured by reference in lambda.

Feel free to use it ;)

Links
[1] http://cookandcommit.blogspot.com/2014/09/tiny-c-benchmark-framework_29.html