On QA Automation Blogposts
I’ve been reading up on the topic of test-automation. One kindof useful resource has been ThoughtWorks’ insights blog, but my feelings towards this are mixed.
Some of the posts have great insights, others are more mundane; and there’s a fetishization of nouns which makes wading through the bullshit to find the useful tips all that much harder. As an [...]
On Wet Shaving
It occurs to me I’ve never written about wet-shaving on this blog. “wet-shaving”, I’d say, is shaving not-with foam-from-a-can / cartridge-razor. So, using a shaving-brush with some shaving-soap (or shaving-cream), lathering the soap for the face, + using a safety/double-edged razor (or a straight-razor) to shave.
Pretty old-school. – I guess in the same way that programmers now may [...]
RWBY's Arkos Ship is Adorable
Recently I went back and re-watched RWBY’s Volume 3, Chapter 12.
Spoilers (up to end of Season 3) below; although I reckon RWBY’s story is good enough that it wouldn’t be “spoiled” by lack of surprise. I also had some fun watching some of the reaction videos for the episode.
I’m not a big fan of reaction videos [...]
On Revising in Programming and Blogging
In one of the more fascinating sidebars in “The Cucumber Book”, Dan North discusses his first experience pair-programming with Martin Fowler; initially aghast that Fowler spent time re-arranging the test code (and at times, duplicating) snippets of code.. until realising the improvement the changes brought: the test code became a more readable story.
(The principle “Don’t Repeat Yourself” was [...]
Cinematic Lego Games
Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga is a classic game worth having in your library. (Ironically, it’s not the complete saga of the Lego games).
– Since then, there’ve been many other Lego games of the same style, like Lego Indiana Jones, Batman, Harry Potter, etc.; the most recent one being for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. If you’ve [...]
Systems and Tools Have Limitations
So “Goodbye OOP” is a piece which has been going around.
I’ve no idea why. I wasn’t able to finish reading it. The author’s tone is amazingly cringe-worthy.
After some time the of the clearly inexpert author (adopting a faux-foolish tone) bashing bad ways of OOP, the author concludes in a paragraph or two with “but, hey, Functional [...]
C++ Object Copying
C++ is quite a different beast of a language to, say, Java or Python.
My early programming experience was in the latter, so I find my ‘mental model’ for reasoning about what C++ does with the code I write is sometimes wrong. One area where I make mistakes is underestimating where C++ will make copies of objects.
That [...]
Men of Valor Has Not Aged Well
It’s kindof fun to see a game you’d seen on store shelves 10 years ago, available on Steam. In this case, Men of Valor, with a usual-price of S$10.50, and at the time of writing, on sale for 75% off. – Look, I removed my payment details from Steam during the Summer Sale, but I can hardly feel bad about [...]
Reflection on Maintaining a Toy C++ Project
A few years ago, for a course on Computational Geometry, my team made a program aiming for a stain-glass effect using Voronoi Diagrams. To quickly explain:
Voronoi Diagrams show the regions which are closest to each point. e.g. for 2 points, you’d bisect the space between them. – By analogy, each ‘point’ would be pizza-delivery, and each region would [...]
Thoughts on JRPGs
My friends told me the PlayStation Vita is a weaboo’s console. While I’d say Sony have badly mismanaged the console, focussing instead on their PS4, one advantage is a decent catalogue of JRPGs available. (Since the Vita is portable, you can play through these on the bus or the train or whatever). So far, my experience in JRPGs consists of [...]