Originally posted on the Agworld Developers Blog, hosted on Tumblr, on March 15, 2013. — Here at Agworld we deal a lot with Paddock boundaries. One of the things we’d like to know is where best to place an icon indicating where the paddock is, given its boundary. This isn’t a trivial problem. Consider a paddock in the shape of the letter “L”. …

Originally posted on the Agworld Developers Blog, hosted on Tumblr, on February 9, 2013. — As the application we’re working on evolves away from a monolithic Rails app and towards a loosely-coupled collection of services, we find that we’re dealing more and more with large JSON blobs. Recently it became apparent that the performance of our JSON wrangling wasn’t up to snuff. Which was weird…

Originally posted on the Agworld Developers Blog, hosted on Tumblr, on June 4, 2012. — If you’ve ever worked with C++ professionally then you’ve most likely read Scott Meyers’ wonderful Effective C++, a collection of specific ways of improving the code you write. Consider, for example, Item 27: Minimise Casting. Lots of in-depth detail, followed by a few rules to follow when writing new code…

Originally posted on the Agworld Developers Blog, hosted on Tumblr, on May 1, 2012. — We use the wonderful Scout service to keep track of the performance of our servers. Alert notifications get pushed into Lighthouse for triage, as we need to make sure that all performance bottlenecks are dealt with, even if that means just changing Scout’s alert thresholds to minimise false positives. Today…

Sesame is the password solution for everyone. — Back in late 2021 I was discussing plans for 2022 with a friend. We had both spent the year working on personal game projects, but were itching to implement an idea that we’d been discussing for many years… A super-simple password manager. Now, there are a lot of password managers…

On August 1, 2021 I published BLaTTiX, a game, after spending 129 calendar days working on it. This is the story of how I made it, and what I learned, and continue to learn, along the way. — BLaTTiX is a dual-stick arena shooter inspired by Encounter on the C64, with everything made from “vectorballs”, like in those old Amiga demos. It is available from itch.io for $5. Here is a gameplay trailer:

Or… How to Generate Content for a Police Procedural — Way back in 2005 I worked at Team Bondi on “L.A. Noire”, where I was tasked with figuring out how to accurately simulate a population of two million people without consuming much memory or taxing the CPU. My first instinct was to build a prototype to see whether a lot…

As a non-American I really wish I could switch this off. But it’s not as simple as silencing the television, avoiding social networks, keeping off YouTube, cancelling magazine subscriptions, unsubscribing from podcasts, avoiding conversations with friends and family, listening only to CDs in the car and averting my gaze when I walk past newsagencies. Because my own thoughts always loop back to what’s going on, like some kind of insidious earworm on repeat, dredging up memories of 1991 and how eerily familiar this all is because it keeps happening and happening and happening and although each new generation is filled with naive hope we all know it will keep on happening forever.

Why the “unexpected spike” in Coronavirus cases is totally expected, and why you should take this seriously. — Imagine that, on a Sunday night, your city reports 5 cases of COVID-19. A week later, on the following Sunday night, they report a total of 20 cases. It is natural to think that the number of cases is growing by 15 per week. …