software-development

Bilingual

Why am I doing this again?
2 months ago
- The author bought the domain due to narcissism and felt compelled to create content for it.
- He uses the site as a productive project to practice coding outside of work, building it from scratch with Ruby, Sinatra, jQuery, HTML, and CSS.
- He plans to post opinions, book reviews, and event reflections to learn and articulate his thoughts better.
- Writing helps him clarify ideas and connect with others; he welcomes feedback and interaction.
Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata
2 months ago
- Developed Mr. Baby Paint, a co-op drawing app for toddlers and parents, featuring a fullscreen canvas with no menus to prevent interruptions and keyboard shortcuts for parents.
- Implemented drawing mechanics: left-click draws, scroll drops sand, right-click paintbuckets; used Catmull-Rom splines for smooth curves and sound/visual effects for rewarding actions.
- Accidentally discovered a flood-fill cellular automata by allowing multiple simultaneous fills, where fills collide and create organic, semi-stable patterns.
- Created 16 fonts, many from old computers, and developed pixel-fattening algorithms to thicken bitmap fonts, settling on a method preserving gaps via JFA distance field with white-space skeleton detection.
- Made Mr. Baby Paint available for sale on itch.io for $4.99 across Mac, Windows, and Linux, selling about 30 copies, and applied the font pipeline to drawings and promotional materials.
Optimizing an Algorithm That's Quadratic by Design
2 months ago
- WhatChord is a MIDI keyboard app that names chords in real-time.
- Chord naming involves ranking plausible interpretations rather than simple dictionary lookups.
- Ranking cannot use ordinary sorting due to non-transitive comparisons and cycles.
- The engine linearizes candidates using pairwise comparisons and Copeland's method.
- Cost is high because the ranking grows quadratically with the number of candidates.
- Optimizations included gating hard-rule scans and making comparisons cheaper.
- Candidate reduction was initially unsafe due to global Copeland counts.
- A reframe allowed pruning candidates without affecting user-visible guarantees.
- Pruning significantly improved performance by removing unsurfaceable candidates.
- Final optimization cut ranking time by over 85% without changing displayed results.
Oak: Git for Agents
2 months ago
- Git requires full repository cloning before accessing files, causing delays. Oak offers lazy mounting, allowing immediate access to files without complete cloning, reducing latency.
- Oak is designed for agent workflows, featuring content-addressed storage, lazy hydration, and content-defined chunking for efficient handling of large files and parallel tasks without shared .git corruption.
- It supports branch-per-session with messageless intermediate commits and branch descriptions as commit messages, improving ergonomics for agents, and exports data to standard Git repos for portability.
Pet projects are getting too big to pet
2 months ago
- Pet projects have traditionally been small, fun endeavors for learning and skill-building without deadlines or users, started on a whim.
- Recently, pet projects have grown in scope and ambition, often evolving into complex endeavors with potential for becoming products or companies, introducing pressure and stakes.
- The shift is partly driven by new technologies like agentic coding, which changes the nature of work to more describing, steering, and deciding, rather than traditional coding.
- There is a trend of maintaining multiple projects simultaneously, leading to challenges in time management and personal capacity, while the community around pet projects has expanded to include non-coders.
- The financial and emotional costs have increased, with subscriptions and token usage becoming common, alongside constant hype and fear of missing out (FOMO) on new tools and techniques.
- Underlying fears exist about technology disrupting careers and industries, with varied coping strategies, and a concern that traditional coding skills may be lost as building moves to higher conceptual layers.
- Despite uncertainties, the author continues building, reflecting on how the nature of hobbies, craft, and fun has transformed, with the future outcome remaining unpredictable.

software-development

Why am I doing this again?

Mr. Baby Paint and accidentally discovering a new cellular automata

Optimizing an Algorithm That's Quadratic by Design

Oak: Git for Agents

Pet projects are getting too big to pet