gaming, dev, stuff
I always had difficulty understanding what Arduino is in essence. My current understanding is that Arduino stands for a whole set of related tools designed to be used together, in order to make it easier to get into microcontroller programming. The individual bits and pieces involved are: Arduino development boards, such as the Uno or Leonardo, typically running AVR chips such as ATmega328P or…
We had a near miss with a mutable default argument in one of my Python projects. Mutable defaults are an old and well-documented problem in Python , arguably a language design mistake. Given its notoriety, I was running under the assumption that it's the kind of obvious Python bug that any linter would immediately pick up and flag. I were to explain to a 6-year-old what a "python linter" is, I'd…
You might doubt if there's really something going on between me and Asteroids remakes, but if you look closer, you'll probably be suspicious the moment you look at the games I tried to make over the years: a good chunk of them might have been attempts at an Asteroids-themed game, and the one I completed was somewhat well-received too. I don't think it's a coincidence; I'd easily contribute that to…
My Spotify subscription is years old, I think it might easily be my oldest online service. I've been generally happy with it, save for the regular, unexpected changes to user interface. If Spotify was a person, it would be a roommate who studies interior design and randomly re-arranges your furniture ("this way is better, you'll see!") However, things have been getting worse: I hear more and more…
I’m the last person to the party, attempting to review the UFO Defense’s sequel when it’s about to turn 30 years old. Given that the game still visits me every few years, I feel obligated to write something about it. Instead of reviewing, let me frame this post as a love letter of some sort. Here's the catch: It’s difficult for me to share the experience of playing TFTD. I’m not sure if I’d say it…
Chaos Communication Camp is a conference / festival event that happens in Germany every four years. The theme covers a wide range of topics around technology, society, and how they interact. But most importantly, it's a gathering of various hackerspaces from all around the Europe and more. I had a chance to attend this year's edition and the event surprised me in a lot of ways. It's difficult to…
January is a good time for retrospectives. As I'm writing this, my team is planning a "best failure of 2018" contest, so I thought it's a good opportunity to write down my personal entry. Here's the story of that time when I left a team to fight burnout, and lost something more important in the process. Read more… (5 min remaining to read)
Old NES games typically supported two-player mode, but the designers' approach towards multiplayer was often surprising, especially with cooperative titles. Some of modern game design principles simply didn't exist at the time, which led to curious situation that we learned to take for granted. Let's look at some examples: Read more… (3 min remaining to read)
In my previous post , I argued that meetings tend to be much better if they have a driver and a well-defined objective. I'd like to invite you to a little thought experiment. Assume there's only one possible meeting objective: to collaboratively write a document. Can you fit each of your meetings into this shape? Read more… (5 min remaining to read)
The original release of Tetris was pretty comprehensive already, even though the graphics used text mode. At least three versions of Tetris have been released on NES: BPS Nintendo Tengen (Atari) The BPS version was the first to be released, but it was tough to play due to very awkward controls. Nintendo's version plays much better. Tengen's own version (dubbed TETЯIS) has a long story to it since…