A dozen ideas for a better Fortnite

Edit (2020): This was written before Fortnite became the battle royale game it is today. When I wrote this, "Fortnite classic" was the whole game. Epic went a totally different direction than I was thinking about. I've been playing a bunch of fortnite over the last week. Below is a…

3 tribes of programming

There's an old joke that computer science is a lie, because its not really about computers, and its not really a science. Funny joke. Everyone laughs, then someone says "Yeah but it sort of is about computers though, isn't it?". Feet shuffle awkwardly. Someone clears their throat and before you…

Cracks

Programming is close to godliness when you're deep in a problem, code is thought made real. In that space you stop existing as a person. You're just a conduit for creation. Squint at the right moment and you can catch them those sparkling cracks in reality at the corners of…

Building a r/place in a weekend

On Friday I accepted a challenge to clone Reddit's /r/place in a weekend. And I did it, and its live, and its amazing: Being able to build this in a weekend isn't genius. Its possible because programming is made up of 2 activities: Making decisions (95%) Typing (5%) Reddit…

The modern web makes me want to throw up

I've written a fair bit over the last few months on other mediums (FB and Hackernews). I'm going to start collecting some of that content and reposting it here. From here: Performance of modern web apps is simply awful compared to their native counterparts by any measure. They load slowly…

Electron is flash for the desktop

What is slack doing? The process was in the background when this happened. I wasn't even interacting with it - I was in a meeting. I only noticed because my laptop fans were whurring when I got back. Restarting slack seemed to fix it for now. But that's not abnormal…