About 8 months ago, I started building my second game for the Playdate. The working title was "Black Hole" (later to be renamed "Radio Silence") and the idea was simple: you are a crew member in a spaceship that needs to enter a black hole. And so you orbit around the black hole, collecting raw m…
A few notes on a few new tools.
What follows is the entire devlog for the first game I ever really finished — ElectroLight for the Playdate! Electrolight is available on itch.io.
This past weekend, I wrapped up a project I've been working on for a few months: making some pen plotter art for a friend as a surprise gift. Here's the end result...
I attended a Processing Jam this week!
Processing is a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code. Since 2001, Processing has promoted software literacy within the visual arts and visual literacy within technology. There are tens of thousands of stude…
The other day a friend asked me what I was working on, programming-wise. To my surprise, the answer was: nothing. Pretty much since I started learning to program in 2015 I have almost always had some kind of programming-oriented project going on (while also working).
Now,…
About a week or so ago, I finally snapped out of it and got off Hacker News (or I should say hckrnews, which is an aggregator for top content I use). I went a week without mindlessly typing the URL in and ending up reading comments. I'm not proud of it, but I just go and read the comments and don…
I've been thinking about the things that make it easier for me to approach new codebases. I'm going to try and list down a few. I have titled this post as a pt. 1 because I imagine I'll come back with new ideas as I get to spend more and more time working on new codebases as a consultant (at least, much more frequently than when I was working as an in-house engineer).
With all that in mind, it’s questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. 30 months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts.
A quote from "Learn to program in 10 years"
What's this? I'm reading up on yet ANOTHER programming language?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. This was a bit of a while coming. I've been wanting to rebuild laundromat and some other MIDI sequencers for a while. Originally, I thought it might be fun to build them with SDL and a tool like C, but a combination of different factors made me think that I should just build for iOS (although I have mixed feelings about building in the Apple ecosystem).
I love to jump from programming language to programming language whenever I feel I need a jolt in my world(view) of programming. This time I did not stay in the world of Zig long enough to build anything with it, but I'm glad that I stopped in and had tea, so to speak. The last month or so that I…
Well, I did end up starting a re-write of firn. I'm having a pretty good time! I'd say I'm about 30-40% done and have probably spent about ... 35 hours on it? It seems like a lot for a project (and I suppose it is), but the learning curve for rust has been steep. I am moving faster and faster wit…
The discussion evolves
I'm back with another report on investigating core.async in Trunk. My thread on clojureverse has evolved quite a bit, …
After fuddling about with Core.async in Trunk I decided it was time to reach out for some input. It was a good thing I did; I had reached a point where I was mostly poking at the functions I thought I understood in core.async, and wasn't really reading their API.
I'm thinking about re-writing my static site generator for Org-mode (Firn) from Clojure to Rust. I'm not sure if I will do it, but I've been thinking about some of the more fundamental design decisions that I want to consider when building software. Firn is built in Clojure, with a touch of Rust for the Org-mode parser, and then is all compiled down to a binary using GraalVM's native-image tool. It's working, so why re-write it?
I would really like to better understand Core Async with Clojure; specifically, I want to remove myself from callback hell to see if I can make my Clojurescript backend for a new project a bit clearer.
My latest project is called Trunk. It's a tool inspired by an application called "Learning with Texts". Rather than go into what it is (see the wiki page), I'll talk a bit about the technical aspects of the project and why I decided to pursue it.