Articles
Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.
They’re different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.
Things that can go wrong when downloading
When I get a little bit too emotional about my current baby, the itch.io app, there’s always a timely support ticket reminding me that it is currently, still a glorified game downloader.
However true that is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy! In the past year, I’ve had to account for a bunch of failure conditions that can happen, some of which I didn’t realize were even possible. Let’s review them, for fun!
itch.io app timeline 2016
I’ve been working on the itch.io desktop app for about a year now, so I thought I’d make a quick recap:
At the time of this writing, the app has been downloaded about 460K times (including updates). Not counting the back-end, the app and its various components are made up of around 100K lines of code (mostly javascript and golang), most of which is open-source.
*andfall
Welp, I did it again - I released an album: it’s named *andfall, a play on the word “landfall”, and I wrote it in one week-end, for @McFunkyPants’ entry in the Ludum Dare 33 game jam.
It’s my first solo album, the previous ones were collaborations with @bigsylvain and @geckojsc. It feels a bit weird to release an album alone - there’s nobody to blame for the flaws, and nobody to praise for the good parts!
ooc generics and flawed designs
ooc is perhaps one of my proudest achievements, but at the same time it’s one of the most annoying thorns in my side.
The main reason is that its design is flawed, and some things can’t be easily fixed at this point. Now don’t get me wrong: every design is flawed to some extent. Design, either when done by a lone coder, or by a committee, never comes out “perfect” — ignoring the fact there is no universal/objective measure of “perfectness”.
S-exps in your browser
The front end of the pool
I’ve been interested in reactive JavaScript for a while. At memoways, we strive to build snappy user interfaces for clients who like to interact with their data with as little latency as possible.
In the past two years, I learned front-end development on-the-fly, as the needs of the clients required it. Two years ago, I was still using jQuery. Then, I discovered space-pen thanks to my colleague Nicolas. It was nice to have proper ‘view’ objects, and use jQuery’s event system to have messages propagate throughout a hierarchy.
Happy stay with us day
I didn’t really know what to do for “World Suicide Prevention Day 2014”.
First off, I didn’t know it existed at all. Like, c’mon, know your audience, if you have a party like that, I want in!
Second, it’s a terrible name: I hereby propose “stay with us day” in place. Nevermind the “world” part because, hey, we’re on the internet, the “suicide” part because, well, avoiding that is just the very start of a long uphill battle, and let’s keep the “day” part because, honest, if we can attract people’s attention for even a single day per year, it’ll be nothing short of a miracle.
Cross-compilation notes
I’ll keep updating this article as I go, just to put stuff in all the same place.
Platforms
Cross-compiling for Linux
I’m pretty sure it’s possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it’s better to use it as a build environment.