2025
19F
2025-03-16 Flickgame
I recently came across Increpare's lovely Flickgame project. It's a kind of slideshow program and
game engine in which scenes are navigated based on which color is clicked on. I
didn't see myself using the javascript implementation, and since this elegant
idea was so straightforward, I figured I might as well spend a day to port it
to Varvara.
I took the opportunity to improve things a bit and made it usable on the
NintendoDS. Once I had a working version, I wrote a compiler for flick games to
uxn roms, so I could share the results. And then, I started drawing little
stories, and then some. How about a #flickjam?
- Implemented a port of Flickgame.
- Redesigned Turye.
- Enjoyed two months sober.
19E
2025-03-05 Working Out
For a while now, I've been feeling like I've sort of maxed out on programming, not to say that I know everything
there is to know about the topic, but that I've learnt enough to shape software
in exactly the way I need to tackle the problems I typically need programming
for. So I've been turning my gaze into other domains of life which I've all but
neglected while on this creative coding journey.
I've ramped things up a notch these past few weeks and dedicated more time to
learning about fitness, nutrition, anatomy and getting a bit smarter about
the way I work out. This new fascination of mine is teetering close to a full
on project, when even on rest days, a sizeable chunk of my waking hours goes
into reading about related topics and planning the next day's exercises and
meals. I might just keep on pulling on that thread to see where this leads. A
nagging voice in my head keeps going on and on about how this might just come
in handy in the very near future.
19D
2025-02-18 Faeputing
I've had various little undocumented utilities
hanging around that didn't share a clear connection in terms of design. I
recently needed a desktop calendar to track some personal stats and decided to
riff on Note Pad for its UI, which is itself already
a port of the classic Macintosh program. To tie it all
together, I gave the same treatment to the music player, which was inspired
from the first generation iPod. They all look really nice next to each other
now.
- Ah yeah, I also wrote a spreadsheet editor.
- Object-oriented stack machine assembly is such a joy!
19C
2025-02-01 Monochrome Oquonie and Neural Nets
Trying to bridge the gap between rewriting
systems and interaction nets, I gave a
second look at McCulloch & Pitts neural nets. I
was curious to see if this would make for a fun and readily parallelizable
language runtime, so I went ahead and spent the better part of the past few
days designing one.
I haven't used it for anything serious yet, but already with as little as 150 lines of code it allows me to
quickly prototype and evaluate tasks! My plan is to use it as a sort of
coordination language.
19B
2025-01-25 Handmade Conference Post-Mortem
Some months ago, attendees of the Handmade Seattle conference expressed their
grievances with the conference in regards to its pivoting to include talks with
mentions of social justice awareness and a slightly more diverse panel of
speakers, at the cost of the usual guy-packs-bytes-in-the-right-sequence
talks. Which I have nothing against as someone who tend to give talks of
that exact flavor.
In any case, the conference organizer apologized for the poor selection of
speakers which did not correspond to the expectations of ticket holders,
promising to resolve the issue in the following year, and in passing, that free
and open source software developers would no longer be welcomed as
speakers.
I happened to be present in the chatroom when the apology letter went out and
merely questioned whether the choice was really about the lack of
low-level talks, and not something else. It did not take long for
bigots of all sorts to come out and lament the good old days of the conference
and soon the chatroom was ablaze with some pretty vile things against trans
people, this went on for hours without intervention, the usual.
What I did not expect was for the conference organizer, who ghosted me for
months, to finally break radio silence to slam me for speaking out and
partially blamming me for the unraveling of the conference organization, and
decided against covering the agreed upon travel stipend. I have since
requested for the talk videos to be removed.
So why is software so terrible?
We made it terrible.
The Handmade Manifesto
19A
2025-01-11 Langdev January
It has become something of a yearly ritual to take the first few days of the
year to write a new implementation of the compiler
I use daily. It serves to see how my programming style and solutions to these
now familiar problems might have evolved, it also ensures that the language
itself doesn't grow beyond what I am capable of implementing in at most a
week's time.
The most discernible difference in this new implementation, is that it leans
heavily on object-oriented patterns, by
favoring methods acting on private values, over pointer arithmetic by function
application. The stack is principally used as the communication channel between
objects, for example, a text object's buffer is only ever modified through its
explicitly defined capabilities, not by a function taking a text pointer. It
turns out it limits bugs, it is faster and even often smaller!
