"What I've Been Up To" Ramble
I haven’t published anything on this blog for some time. I’ll break that absense with a bit of a ramble. I’ve just relocated to Vietnam, to live with my girlfriend.
Currently, I’m on a “personal sabbatical”. The first part of this ‘sabbatical’ has been spent on relocating, and on catching up on some of my Steam backlog.
(I [...]
StackOverflow, Elitism, and Community
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942. StackOverflow’s discussion that it ought to do more to be more welcoming. Some of the points highlighted: Dickish behaviour on StackOverflow comes from the perverse incentives of its reputation system.
e.g. one way to be rewarded with reputation is to ‘edit’ an answer. This leads to frivolous editing, such as removing “thanks” from a question. There’s also a [...]
Employment Interactions are a Mix of Market and Social
One of the kindof interesting parts of Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational” is where he points out some interactions between people are ‘social’, some are ‘market-oriented’; these two kinds of interactions have different protocols and don’t mix well. The most striking example of this is something like lawyers who are willing to do pro-bono work; but not willing to do the [...]
Playing Videogames with my Girlfriend
My girlfriend and I have had a bunch of fun playing videogames together. Layton’s Mysteries I had bought this for the Nintendo 2DS.
I didn’t realise it was available on Android phones, and I’d heard good things about the Layton series.
Unfortunately, many reviews suggest that other games in the series are better. In any case, we found [...]
FasterThanLight's Sequel Into The Breach
“Faster Than Light” (FTL) was a very cool game.
You basically got to play as the captain of a starship. Gameplay would be like “Divert power from the shields to the weapons. Target their engines!”.
But the game was also ‘rogue-like’. The gameplay didn’t take place in a single crafted, designed campaign of missions. The ‘campaign’ was procedurally [...]
LinkedIn Can Be Fun Sometimes
LinkedIn always strikes me as one of those networks which people will just kind of ‘have’ for ‘job stuff’. The folk you’ve met when you’re at work or when they’re at work or when you meet someone and they mention they have a job or they mention they want a job.
“Professional Network”. From what I can tell glancing [...]
Vigilant Reflection
One good, sensible motto that is worth keeping in mind every now and then is to reflect: ‘Where am I at? Where do I want to be? How can I get there?’. – I’m not sure how that works for ‘I don’t know what I want’; but it’s much better to know that you don’t know, than to just have [...]
On Maintaining on Old Side Project
Recently I’ve had the motivation to try and maintain one of my side-projects.
Or at least, brush it up from being “completely awful” to “not terrible”. This is mostly just for fun.
But in a way, it’s valuable in that I learn the lessons of what it’s like to maintain a project which isn’t freshly-written. That’s the kindof [...]
Hitman is Fun
I hadn’t really played any of the previous games in the Hitman series.
My experience was limited to watching games on YouTube. I picked up the game recently. The game was released episodically.
So, they released level-by-level. Each new release did see improvements to the gameplay and such, too. This seems much more sober and professional than “early [...]
Asking for Help Threshold
I think my experience is probably similar to other talented programmers fresh to the workforce: To not ‘ask for help’ with a problem until too much time has been spent stuck on the problem. This isn’t too strange.
As hobbyists, or as students in school, we program and learn individually. I think ‘talented’ really means ‘has made more mistakes’. [...]