Write once, copy once, refactor once.
This post is about effectively using your time. It is not a defence of taking on huge technical debt to make your life easier for a single day, and you are hopefully smart enough to avoid doing that....
View ArticleHow to properly build what you want to build.
To build something you really want to build, and build it right, you need time and expertise. You may need money. You will likely need more of all of them than you’ve currently got, unless you are Bill...
View ArticleOur Corporate Vision
We will do everything. Everything that everyone does, they’ll do it through us. Email, music, notes, chat, storage, web browsing, we will do all of it. We’ll combine all of the disparate services you...
View ArticleThe Status Page
wcarss.ca/status It’s not exactly dynamic, nor is it particularly useful, but hey. Why not? This is essentially a stopped clock, that will be right somewhat less than twice a day. It may at times be...
View ArticleOn Distractions and Tools
I’m writing this blog post to relate the following: I’m planning a reading tour through the American Revolution, probably starting with Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard...
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good code is legacy code upon instantiation
This is a pretty good post (rambling, but give it some license): http://programmingisterrible.com/post/139222674273/write-code-that-is-easy-to-delete-not-easy-to I got there from here, also a decent...
View ArticleProgress Ratchets
Let’s just get this out of the way: Ratchet (device), a mechanical device that allows movement in only one direction When going back to play an old video game with blocky polygons and low framerates,...
View ArticleHello from Hong Kong!
I’ve just migrated hosts and this blog is now running on a different operating system, web server, php version, and database version, and all of its content got pooped out into a file and slurped back...
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searching for special chars in vim and setting aliases in windows cmd
Vim Spells This morning I was looking over the old reading list and noticed that A Night in the Lonesome October had some strange characters floating around, which I wanted to delete. I felt that...
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Installing Rust on Windows in 2018
Rust is a systems programming language in a similar space to C++ that I’ve been meaning to try out for some time. Reddit’s roguelikedev community recently began doing a community-wide...
View ArticlePlanning Poker is a Finger Pointing at the Moon
And boy, do people hate planning poker. It comes up all the time with friends and coworkers. When talking about life as a dev, work processes, management, or the industry as a whole, eventually someone...
View ArticleGoogle’s “Verify it’s You” pattern is dangerous
Years ago, Google introduced “Verify It’s You”, basically just a prompt to log back in after session expiry, and it has always irked me: it trains users to see an otherwise unidentified tab with a...
View ArticleIdiomatic
I wish I could remember where I got these. I’m pretty sure it was a markov chain, trained on common idioms and placed on someone’s website, likely linked to from an IRC I was in, or on hacker news,...
View Articlenote for later: overclock the NES to stop it from slowing down due to too...
How To Overclock the NES We’ve been playing the NES we purchased earlier this year a lot lately. While we do have an Everdrive ready to help us get some homebrew going later (I’ve worked through a...
View ArticleSome future “big walk” suggestions
I don’t walk every day, but I do consider myself a walker. When I lived in Toronto, I would often walk from Bloor and Dundas West up toward Sheppard, catch the subway back down to Bloor, then walk...
View ArticleLink dump: distributed systems and video games
I googled “distributed systems masterclass” on a lark today, and ran across a nice looking free course (no affiliation), and it got me on a bit of a roll for related content. I found some new stuff...
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Rewriting An Old OpenGL Minecraft Clone
(strains of piano drift across the lake) Years ago, for a university project, I made a minecraft-like game in C with some already-very-dated OpenGL toolkits and versions. It was a color-by-numbers...
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Screenshots! Minecraft Clone Rewrite Update
I went with “Path 2” from the previous blogpost, and here are the bare beginnings: the dirt really catches the sunlight! You may notice that this image bears some extraordinary similarities to the...
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