Me in 2007 : Building something is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. Iterate between the two as fast as you can. Stefan Lesser in 2023 (paraphrased): Building helps understand ourselves through the world, and understand the world through ourselves. Me now: Building things is easy. Evaluating what you build is hard. It requires lots of attention . Therefore, build things that you want to pay…
Here's a document containing a line of text: {type='text', data={'hello, world'}} I'm building in Lua, so I'm reusing Lua syntax. Here's how it looks: Such text boxes are the workhorse of this markup language. There are 3 other kinds of boxes: rows , cols and filler . Rows and cols can nest other boxes. But let's focus on text boxes for a bit. Here's a text box containing two lines of text:…
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I talk a lot here about using computers freely , how to select programs to use, how to decide if a program is trustworthy infrastructure one can safely depend on in the long term. I also spend my time building such infrastructure, because there isn't a lot of it out there. As I do so, I'm always acutely aware that I'm just not very good at it. At best I can claim I try to compensate for limited…
The kids have been enjoying Baba is You , and watching them brought back pleasant memories for me of playing the classic crate-pushing game Sokoban . So I went looking and found a very nice project that has collected 300 classic publicly available Sokoban puzzles. Then of course I had to get it on my phone so I could play it anywhere. The result is the sokoban.love client. video; 1 minute On a…
rabbot.love is a little helper I whipped up to check the programs the kids were writing for a neat little paper computer . video; 25 seconds
I finally decided to hang up a shingle on itch.io. My first app there is not a game. Lua Carousel is a lightweight environment for writing small, throwaway Lua and LÖVE programs. With many thanks to Mike Stein who helped me figure out how to get it working on iOS, this is my first truly cross-platform app, working on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. repo Carousel has its own devlog/notebook.…
A little sudoku-like app for helping first-graders practice addition. This attempt at situated software for schooling got a little more use than spell-cards.love . video; 25 seconds
crosstable.love is a little app I whipped up for tracking standings during the Cricket World Cup, just to avoid the drudgery of resorting rows as new results come in. video; 20 seconds
It's a very common workflow. Type out a LÖVE app. Try running it. Get an error, go back to the source code. How can we do this from within the LÖVE app ? So there's nothing to install? This is a story about a hundred lines of code that do it. I'm probably not the first to discover the trick, but I hadn't seen it before and it feels a bit magical. Read more