Dungeon Mastering
Designing dungeons seems easy at first glance. It did for me. And when you really think about on a room-by-room basis, it is easy. You just need to draw a box...
Jason Lotito | damnscout
Thoughts on development, RPGs, and the craft of building things.
Latest posts
Stone Stacking in adungeon.com
If you have ever tried to hand-place a bunch of stone outlines in a pixel dungeon, you know what happens. You either get weird gaps, shapes that bump into each...
The Art of Debugging: A Developer's Meditation
In the depths of console.log statements, wisdom awaits those patient enough to seek it...
Conquering the Mountain of Technical Debt
Every refactor is a step toward enlightenment, every deprecated method a lesson learned...
New Horizons: Embracing the Unknown Stack
A new framework appears on the horizon. Do you choose to learn it?...
How I come up with some of the buffs in game
As I am writing the game, there are times I want to test something out in the game, but because of the nature of the game, getting to that state naturally will...
Developer Note
Notes on adding a lock-speed buff to support testing and expand gameplay depth.
YAGNI: You Ain’t Gonna Need It
Or when is “too much” too much? In my head, I had picture guns circling the player, bullets firing from him. Each gun would be unique, and it would look cool...
Godot Shaders
Shaders are scary. Not really, but they are. Okay, if that sounds confusing, it’s the fact that with simple inputs, you can get some pretty crazy outputs. I am...
Xenod: Initial Development of a roguelike
The current codename for this game is xenod, Xeno Defense. This is a very early look at the game. There is still a lot to do, but I wanted to share this out to...
Lessons
> So much to say. I think the core lessons are: be patient, don’t give up, and always be learning. You can turn even the most crappy situation into valuable...
Keeping SSH connections alive
It’s actually fairly simple. In your SSH config file, you add this: Host ServerAliveInterval 240 The after the host can be whatever host you want it to apply...
Technology behind photos
> So, we looked at JPEG image encoding, which is a very popular image codec. Especially since our image is going to be blurred heavily on the client, and thus...
Performance – Or how I learned to evaluate better
1. Given what I know of this person’s performance, and if it were my money, I would award this person the highest possible compensation increase and bonus. 2...
10 Simple Things to Improve Your Tech Talks
1. Practice your talk before speaking. Several times. Record yourself. Watch it. At a conference, people paid $$$ for this. 2. Assume wifi is unavailable for...
Highlighting code in presentations
Before I started using this method, I always struggled with ways to highlight parts of code I wanted to talk about when giving presentations. This method, I’ve...
Simple Startup Ideas
All too often on Hacker News, I come across a comment like this: > wouldn’t most of them be able to build something like this for internal use in a single day...
Agility
Find out where you are Take a small step towards your goal Adjust your understanding based on what you learned Repeat > When faced with two of more...
How to read more
Last year I read 37 books. I don’t pretend that this is a high number. I know that there are people that read far more books than that. However, I also know...
How to become a better developer
You are building something for someone. Whether that someone are other people just like you, people mostly like you, or people completely different from you...
Do Less
I’ve been thinking a lot about performance this past year. Both on the client side and the server side as well. While it might not come as a surprise, the...
How to learn a new programming language
I used to have a problem learning new programming languages. It wasn’t that I found the syntax difficult, or that concepts eluded me. Rather, it was the idea...
How We Killed Our Process, Technology Stack, and Assumptions — and Survived
Atlassian Summit 2013 Talk
The Benefits of Speaking
_Originally posted on theMeetMe Engineering Blog._ I enjoy speaking in front of an audience. This doesn’t mean I don’t get nervous. Oh, I get nervous enough...
Features of Leadership
Since speaking at Atlassian Summit (of which I’ll be writing and sharing more about in the coming weeks), I’ve been following up by reading more and more about...
WeGotYourSite
I’ve been on a Startup Weekend kick this past year. I’ve attended the 3rd Philly Startup Weekend, the first Philly Health Startup Weekend, the 4th Philly...
Inbred Code Review
I’ve never heard this term before, but it’s something I’ve coined here at work. Essentially, it’s when a few people working on the same project pass code...
PHP Tips and Tricks: Array Lengths
This is a simple trick. It makes the assumption that you manage your arrays properly, and in this case, you are using an array (or list), and not a dictionary...
Injectors: Dependency Injection with Traits
With the release of PHP 5.4, Traits were added to our toolbox. And, if I might be so bold, it’s one of the most exciting features I’ve seen come out of PHP in...
Simple, or why companies reinvent solutions
> A designer knows that he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away – _Antoine de St-Expurey_...
Ideas of March 2012
That time again. I wrote something last year, covering the ideas of march. Last year, bloggers came out and shared their ideas, and I imagine this year will be...
vim faster with maps
At myYearbook, we pack our JS and CSS files. Much of this is automated now with Jenkins, but we still have legacy code that must be packed by hand. And, at the...
Someone thinks this is good
No. How this is considered good, I don’t know. Who wrote the code isn’t important – this is the way the code is supposed to be written. At least, this is the...
Learning the vi language
I’m a long time user of vi (and I use vi interchangeably for both vi and vim), but it wasn’t until recently that I really started to understand the way vi...
2012 – Reflection and Resolutions
It’s safe to say 2011 was a big year for me. In 2001, I moved to Montreal, Quebec to be wife my now-wife, Piera. I got my first real job programming PHP for an...
Installing PEAR on Lion
Needed to install PEAR on Lion, as my laptop hadn’t yet needed it. Wanted to see fi there was a way within Lion, and discovered the instructions. sudo cp...
Blocks
> 1. Do one thing. > 2. Do it well. > 3. Keep it concise. > 4. Use only what is given. > Today we continue from Comments and explore how to refactor out code...
Comments
I once posted “comments indicate future refactoring.” I want to reaffirm my belief in that, and clearly explain. In order to fully appreciate this, let’s lay...
I picked the destination
In August, I moved from Montreal after almost 10 years to the small town of Telford, Pennsylvania, a little less than an hour north of Philadelphia. It’s a...
How not to automatically detect location
We’re moving. We are leaving Montreal, and moving to Telford, PA. And it’s happening soon. Very soon. Luckily, we have most everything in order. A place to...
iTunes Match and the Music Labels
Apple announced on Monday iCloud, Lion, and iOS5. Oh , and one more thing: iTunes Match. A 24.99$ a year service that lets you take your existing pira…. er...
How to get an invite to Forrst
If you don’t know, Forrst is a invite-online developer and designer community started by Kyle Bragger (@kylebragger). It’s a fairly friendly community, with...
ssh connection sharing
ControlMaster and ControlPath are the ssh config options you are looking to use here. You’ll want to add them to your ssh config file, which is located in...
Sometimes I amaze myself
Zach posted to HN about how he wanted to work for a company like Twilio, but wasn’t sure. I am not an example of brevity when I write, so I was quite happy...
Normalisation of data
_This post used to be called Don’t confuse validation with filtering. This was meant to be about normalising data, but at the time, filtering was at the...
Profiling a PHP Application
Eric Hogue, a fellow PHP programmer up here in Montreal has written about Profiling a PHP Application. It’s a solid step-by-step setup of XHProf, XHGui, Xdebug...
Object Oriented Programming: Data Mapping
Just because you use objects doesn’t mean you are programming in an object oriented manner. A function like this defeats the purpose: public function init() {...
4JC.IN
4JC.IN is useless for anyone but me, but it’s still useful for me. A simple tool, a weekend project, and a little exploratory on the web design side of things...
Eclipse with FTP Support
FTP in Eclipse? This question gets asked a lot. An FTP plugin for Eclipse that will put your file up onto the server with a save of the file. I don’t use it...
privacy.txt
privacy.txt is last weekends project. It’s a simple idea. I’m currently putting together a parser in PHP. I also want to see about implementing browser plugins...