Blog posts tagged with 'tech'

Five Reasons to build your website with Hugo

I was making some small changes to my website last week, I don’t remember exactly what I was doing. I was sitting there. Waiting for my changes to appear. Watching the clock tick away. Contemplating the reality that every second I spend waiting for my build to finish is a second that I’m never going to get back. There’s got to be a better way! Turns out there was. All of a sudden, I spent an entire weekend gutting my website, ripping out Middleman, the static site generator I was using, and replacing it with Hugo.

Vim plugins I like

Vim is a text editor. I’ve been using it for over 6 years now and I’m madly in love with it. If you’re married to the command line like I am (or want to be), then getting over Vim’s steep learning curve will be well worth the effort. There’s quite a few good resources out there to help non-Vim users get acquainted with it. What makes Vim so cool? Vim is powerful.

Undiscording yourself 101

Skip ahead if you know what you’re doing and just want to learn how to delete all your messages on a Discord server. Discord is a social media platform allowing users in various user-created groups, called servers, to chat with each other through text or voice chat and stream video of themselves or their screen, all in real time. Text messages are stored on the server forever and aren’t automatically deleted no matter how old they are or currently relevant they are.

Exploring Marcus Aurelius's Meditations

I recently read Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations (translated by Gregory Hays) and I quite enjoyed it. Some of his ideas are still relevant today and others haven’t aged very well (which is not surprising given how far removed Marcus’s experience of life is from our own). Overall, the text was interesting enough for me to be motivated to make this little toy that shows you one of the “meditations” every time you refresh the page (tip: if you click/tap on a word it’ll bring you to another meditation containing that word).

Baby's First 3D Models for Printing

I’ve been thinking of buying a 3D printer… It’s something I’ve always been interested in but until recently I haven’t had the space for it. The consumer 3D printing world has gotten a lot cheaper and simpler to get into in recent years. In preparation for that I’ve been playing around with OpenSCAD. It’s a CAD (Computer-aided design) program which, according to Wikipedia, is a computer program used to aid in the creation, modification, analysis or optimization of a design.

The Second Coming of Rust

In these UNCERTAIN TIMES, I’ve found myself with a little more free time than usual because I haven’t needed to commute to an office every day. I’ve tried to funnel that energy into creative and constructive hobbies. Keyword: tried. In the past week, I’ve spent some of that time learning the Rust programming language. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it and I finally took the plunge. Here’s a couple of notable features that I’ve managed to grok from my brief time with it.

A Gamer's Guide to: Cheating in Single-Player Games

Welcome to my second “A Gamer’s Guide to” blog post (check out my previous one on online multiplayer video games). I’ll be explaining how you can cheat in single-player games on PC. If you’re feeling like a rebel then take a seat and prepare to bask in the glow of infinite health, infinite currency and infinity itself. Feel free to use the techniques that I describe below at your own risk, I don’t advise cheating in any game that is a live service, is online in any way, has leaderboards or has micro-transactions.

A Gamer's Guide to: Online Multiplayer

Welcome to my first “A Gamer’s Guide to…”. This series of articles will cover a wide range of topics of interest to gamers from the perspective of a video game programmer. I know a little about what goes into making a video game. I gained a wide breadth of knowledge of every part of a video game including game engines, physics, gameplay, audio, AI, C++ (shiver) and more in my studies.

Interviews - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Looking for a job sucks. A couple of months ago, I was going through interview after interview like a wrecking ball blasting through concrete. No buildings were destroyed in the process but I may have burned some bridges along the way. We laughed, we cried, it was roller coaster of emotions and then I got a job. Here’s a blow-by-blow review of the interviews I went through. I’ve reflected on each interview and coupled each with recommendations for you if you are or are planning to go through a similar interview process.

I code review an 8 year old project

One of the first projects I worked on after learning how to program, around 8 years ago, is called writerator. It is a Python command line interface (or CLI for short) for analyzing English language text and generating randomized poetry such as haikus and poems. I was contemplating using it to build a new side project which would analyze text from all over the internet from the previous day (news articles, Twitter posts, etc.

Building a website for 17$ or less

The website you’re reading this on was built by myself and it cost me a total of 17$ CDN (yearly). Without a custom domain it would have cost me nothing, zilch, nada. My goal for this website was to create my own space on the internet to allow me to easily share the software engineering work I’ve done, share the writing I do on video games and encourage me to write about other topics that interest me.