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Archives for Programming

composing, decomposing, and recomposing methods

Applying Compose Method After I wrote that post on precedence, map, and function composition in Scala, I started to wonder: I’ve been thinking that I should experiment more with applying Compose Method. That refactoring recommends that, if I start with the original version of my code, data.foreach(s => writer.addDocument(createDocument s)) then I should extract the […]

gdc 2011: friday

The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport Hybrid Orchestration – Scoring Need for Speed The Game Design Challenge 2011: Bigger than Jesus An Apology for Roger Ebert Message Queuing on a Large Scale: IMVU’s Stateful Event Architecture 9:30am–10:30am: “The Game Design of Starcraft II: Designing an E-Sport”, by Dustin Browder 2005. Dawn of […]

gdc 2011: monday

This year, unlike previous years, I’m taking notes in my iPad instead of in my notebook. That means that I can generally read my notes, which is good; but it also increases my tendency to just write down slides with minimal commentary, editing, or even formatting. (And I’m sure that amusing iPad autocorrects will slip […]

underscores and precedence in scala

At work recently, I was writing some code which wanted to add all the elements of a collection of strings to a document writer. This seemed like a classic case for foreach, so I wrote something like this: data.foreach(s => writer.addDocument(createDocument s)) (Warning: I’m typing this from memory, without trying it out in the Scala […]

a few early scala notes

I haven’t started programming Scala in earnest yet, though I’ve been going through some books and typed a bit into the interpreter. (Whee, JVM startup times.) I had the Odersky book recommended to me, but I actually first read the PragProg book: I’ve had good luck with some of their books recently, it’s quite a […]

job search and narrative

Beginnings As soon as Disney’s acquisition of Playdom closed, e-mails from recruiters started appearing regularly in my inbox. Most of them I essentially ignored: I’d been having a great time at Playdom, and while I didn’t expect to stay there for the six years that I’d stayed in my previous job, I certainly wasn’t planning […]

gospel morality: matthew 8-9

And now we take a break from the context-free sermonizing, and turn to narrative. Specifically, about Jesus curing people right and left; hard not to like that! And, consistent with what we’ve seen earlier, he doesn’t want word getting around about his actions. (Though, as you might expect, it didn’t really work out that way…) […]

i am getting old

Earlier this evening, I wanted to dust off some JavaScript code I’d written a little while ago. The editor I’d used while writing it initially was TextMate, which I’d liked okay but not enough to convince me that it was worth spending fifty bucks on once the trial period expired. So I opened up the […]

looking back at my first year at playdom

It’s been a little more than a year since I joined Playdom, so I figured I should collect my thoughts about how it’s gone so far and get ideas about what I might want my next year to look like. Looking back, it’s kind of amazing how many different things I’ve done over that last […]

making a mockery

One of the things I got out of Agile Open California this year was a decision that I should work harder at removing database access from the unit tests for our Java code. It will probably be a pain, but I’ve dealt with legacy code before, I know the basic ideas of what to do, […]

random links: june 30, 2010

Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning. Scary; I’m very glad Miranda is now a competent swimmer. Epic Wimbledon reporting; start at around 4:05pm or so. (Via @dan_schmidt.) Memory hierarchies and algorithm analysis. (Via @mfeathers.) Interesting point of view on hyperlinks and footnotes. (Via @scottros.) For all of you Plato fans out there: (Via here and now.) […]

tdd and javascript

As I mentioned earlier, I’ve been having a lot of fun at work playing around with JavaScript and CSS. But there is one area where I’ve been failing miserably: for the first time in years, I’m writing very few tests while programming. I’m working on a legacy code base, with all that entails, but that […]

random links: june 2, 2010

Watch this illusion: Why can’t we make another Shadow of the Colossus? Super Mario World camera behavior. (Via @danbruno.) An Apple //e really does make a good iPad stand. Jupiter loses a stripe. (Via @stephentotilo.) Ruby Ramen? (Make sure to look at the different product pictures.) (Via @yukihiro_matz.) I’m not exactly happy to learn that […]

javascript and css

I transitioned to a game team at work a couple of months ago. One of the reasons why I chose that particular team was that they were willing to let me do front end work, despite my lack of experience in that realm; this excited me because I figured I’d learn more that way than […]

random links: may 10, 2010

The Internet Archive has made a million books available for free to those who are blind or otherwise print-impaired. A delightful Bob-omb Battlefield performance. A city of staples. (Via @rands.) I love this attitude towards reuse. (Via @markhneedham.) “Games are too hard, they’re too long, and they provide way too much stuff.” (Via @ncroal.) CSS […]

random links: april 25, 2010

Daniel Floyd and James Portnow on Video Games and Moral Choices. Ryan from 37 Signals on applying Christopher Alexander to everyday work. Seth Godin’s April Linchpin session. A cat and an iPad. Which I find totally fascinating in a non-cat-youtube-video way. (Via @Laralyn.) I am a biotic god! (Via @truffle.) Amazing clouds. (Via @marick; also, […]

habitable software

There’s been lots of discussion recently about the fact that certain computing platforms are less open than some people would prefer, with many people being up in arms about this fact. Once, I would have been one of those people; these days, I’m not (though seeing the reduction in openness does make me sad), and […]

random links: april 11, 2010

What core gamers should know about social games. Ian Bogost’s GDC 2010 microtalk. Roger Travis’s latest teaching experiment. This is not a spiral. A cool platformer twist. (Via @SimonParkin.) Jane McGonigal’s 2010 TED talk. A useful counterpoint to the discussion that Jesse Schell’s talk led to. The FarmVille diaries. (Via @SimonParkin.) Functional programming, OO programming, […]

small steps in haskell

One of my biggest surprises when learning Haskell has been how my typical test-driven development steps fail: it’s easy to write a couple of tests and get them to pass gracelessly, but surprisingly quickly I run into a test that I can’t get to pass without actually being smart, forcing me to make a leap […]

random links: november 24, 2009

Gerald Weinberg is, sadly, in poor health. Never tried doing Rock Band vocals this way… (Takes 15 seconds or so to actually start.) (Via @dan_schmidt.) R.I.P., Brother Blue. (Via @scottros.) The difference between motion and action. (Via @harlan_knight.) An unforeseen design problem. (Via @shawnr.) Nice perspective on slow programming languages. Glad to see non-Miyazaki Ghibli […]