The Production Proof of Concept

As developers, it’s easy to fall for the siren song of building the perfect system. Planning for every contingency, designing for millions of users, and ensuring perfect code coverage all seem noble. Surely this guarantees no bugs and perfect alignment with customer needs, right?

API Reference in Game Maker Studio 2

So there you are – coding up a new particle system for your game. For some reason, the particles in the new system are always black, despite your best efforts. Perhaps you’re misinterpreting the parameters to part_type_color_rgb() in that they’re not 0-1 inclusive but 0-255 inclusive. Using your pro-level Google-foo, you find yourself at a […]

The Game-Dev Rustlers

Twenty years ago (!) I was hanging out in the college computer lab, reading a book about which assembly registers to twiddle to put the graphics card into direct mode. Crap. Another Blue Screen. Enter one lab monitor, Derrick Schommer (@everydaydrinker), asking me what I was doing to continually keep crashing Windows. Upon learning that I […]

Python List Comprehension

I’ll be honest, until recently, Python list comprehensions were avoided at all cost. They seemed confusing and akin to a ternary if statement gone horribly amuck. Readability of a list comprehension is tricky because there is no delimiter to segment the various elements (modify, loop, filter logic). Simply put… A list comprehension generates a new list […]

Mr. Freeze

As mentioned in the last post, I was looking into creating a simple solution for incremental backups. As I start hosting more websites, I’ll need to ensure reliable backups are available at various time frequencies. Some hosted sites are so infrequently updated, a monthly backup is all that’s needed. Others, would benefit from hourly point-in-time snapshots in addition to the […]

Software Tool Ideas

During the course of working, I often find myself looking for a software tool to perform a specific task. Sometimes there’s one that fits the bill, other times, there is room for improvement. Lately, two areas have presented an opportunity for a new tool to be created. HTTP Load Generation Lately I’ve been working with DPDK […]