Mesh 3d Engine Progress

     

NOTE Demo links on here depend a lot on your system and video card. For example, Firefox 60 on my desktop doesn’t work, but on my laptop it does. Chrome works on my desktop, but not my laptop. And Safari, well, yeah. But give them a go - you’ll know if they work.

I’ve been obsessed for the past few days trying to get my little 3d game engine closer to useful. I’ve had some progress this weekend. It was frustrating, but also very fun.

It is time to get into Webassembly

     

I’ve been keeping an eye on webassembly for the past few years, but it hasn’t felt ready to be used yet. However, over the weekend I took another look, and, to me, it seems baked enough to start using it “for reals” now.

If you don’t know, webassembly is an attempt to create an assembly like language for the web. Instead of writing JavaScript, you’d write in an assembly language which would get your code base to run much faster (sometimes 30x faster from what I have read).

Web Components and Training Plans

     

Web Components are the future… at least that’s what this news letter I read said.

I like the promise of web components. They basically, seem to me, to be Angular 5 / React like functionality built into standard HTML. They give you the ability to create new tags for HTML that do super special things.

I’ve been wanting a way to publish and share some basic .ics (ICalendar) files on my running / triathlon site.

Sharing Angular 5 Modules

     

If you’ve ever worked on a project where you’ve tried to share code between two (or more) projects, you probably understand the pain. Sadly, I’ve worked on a few.

Admittedly, on the surface it seems like a tempting proposition. On paper, it sounds quite easy. For example, one system I worked on we had a single nuget library where we kept our domain objects. The logic went: “All you have to do when you want to make a change is update the domain object project, build, push the new library to the nuget server, then pull down the new library to the other projects, and then rebuild those. It’s easy.”

Using AWS Codebuild with Yarn and Chrome

     

I am a big fan of using CI / CD. As most software engineers are. That’s not a very controversial stance.

For open source projects there are some really nice services out there. One such service is Travis CI. I really like their service for open source projects, but I have a few side projects that I don’t want to open source.

My side projects are not for monetary gain so there is no revenue from them. They aren’t going to be businesses or anything like that, but I also have no desire to open source them. When I went to look at using Travis CI for these type of projects, the pricing model is, well, way too pricy - $69 USD per month… per month. My entire Amazon infrastructure bill isn’t that much.

A More Interesting Retry

     

I’ve been playing with writing my own Typescript / WebGL 3d game engine from scratch and fumbling about with machine learning (which oddly have a lot in common). The hobby has led me to studying linear algebra, which has got me looking at lots of problems in a different light. I blame a lot of my recent thinking on the YouTube Channel 3 Brown 1 Blue. The author of that channel lays out maths in a very visual way - it is much to my liking. The way he explains things has really re-sparked my interest in mathematics.

Poor mans UML / Emacs Artist Mode

     

When building or designing software, I love to draw diagrams. I find the old adage “a picture is worth one thousand words” to be spot on.

I also find that the diagrams are the most useful when they are right next to the source code. Having to drudge though a wiki or search though a separate documents folder to find the diagram that refers to the code I am looking at seems like a waste of time.

What are closures in javascript

     

In my pursuit of gainful employment, I was asked an interview question about closures in javascript. The question kind of threw me for a loop because when writing javascript I have never consciously thought “ok, now I need to use a closure here.” I answered the question poorly - mostly just passing on it - and decided to research it later.

Now, I have used closures in Groovy which look something like this:

How to fix "Soft 404s" in Wordpress

     

We’ve been moving a somewhat large site from a proprietary platform onto Wordpress. As you probably know, when you move a site from one platform to another, a lot of the URLs will change. In our case, amongst other things, many URLs went from having an .aspx extension to having none. On top of that, some features or pages just don’t exist anymore.

To combat the URL confusion, we proactively monitor and attempt to fix 404s before, during, and for a few months after a move. To do that we have some proprietary tools, some log parsers, and we also use Google Webmaster Tools.

Vegan eateries by location and budgets

     

The end of the year is one of my favorite times of year. It’s when I see how I did with the goals I set for the current year and start to plan out my next adventures for the new year. I also like to either delete old ideas, or finish up random, playing-around code I have sitting in the old Projects folder.

This year I made a conscious effort to refrain from putting out bits of code, but there are two proof of concept apps that I found useful and kind of fun. Instead of sending them to the trash, I thought I’d put them up. The hopes are that the examples may help someone just starting with a few of these technologies, but keep in mind these were just things I made to learn a particular technology. I wouldn’t call them finished products.