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Peter Bhat Harkins
Solving vs. Fixing vs. Introspecting
Code: bugs, design, introspection
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I liked this blog post Solving vs. Fixing (via). In my first job out of college I did support and maintenance on a medium-sized (250kloc) system that had spent a year looked after by a developer who only fixed things, never solved them. The code had started poor and gotten gotten steadily worse, but I always tried to fix bugs twice and slowly ground out improvements in the system.
FTL: Simulationism Lost
Games: FTL, game design, roguelikes
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All weekend I’ve been captaining a series of (mostly doomed) Trek-like starships in FTL, a new indie game. The gameplay is mostly derived from time management and roguelike games (more on that later), as you juggle crew between tasks, shift power between systems (straight up “more power to the engines and target their shields!”), and balance exploring the galaxy with fleeing from an ever-advancing plot device that’s too boring to describe.
Open and Closed Platforms
Life: gaming, iPhone, Ouya, smartphones
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I keep having to explain why I don’t own a smartphone. There’s one big reason, but let me quickly run some other things that matter before I get to it.
Legacy Bitmask Puzzle
Code: legacy, math, puzzle, SQL
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My friend David had a puzzle in his legacy app. There’s a bitmask called ErrorCode. The table ErrorCodes lists the meaning of each bit: