Something I’ve been pondering on lately: do you preserve your very old creations? I’m talking ancient here, but do put this in context, since it’s software development ancient. How old is “old” software? In case of JavaScript, probably yesterday. I happen to be someone who neatly … | Continue reading
My desktop lacks sparkles, silliness, and a general evocation of fun. I’ve been wondering why, and came to the conclusion that the culprit is MacOS itself. At the moment, my computer desktop looks like this: OSX 12.2, 10/2022 Besides the (temporary) mess—game screenshot … | Continue reading
Ever since a professor of a neighboring university remarked “I’m most proud of my graduates when they just call themselves programmers"—while he clearly loves his status as Prof. Dr.—I’ve been wondering: is there a thematic or conceptual difference between a programmer, a develop … | Continue reading
This may sound silly to some, but lately, I’ve been feeling a bit guilty. Guilty because I’ve not been a good lad and crunched those hours as well as I could have, according to the imposed numbers on my contract. My current job allows for a very high degree of freedom. Anything t … | Continue reading
September 2022 is no more. Life started getting in the way of blogging frequently, with “only” 6 posts, compared to 10 in July and 9 in August. That’s still more than 1 a week so no reason to panick. Most of my keyboard strokes went towards my new book The Creative Programmer whi … | Continue reading
Do you remember trying to locate the backslash \ on your keyboard in the late eighties after realizing it’s key (ha!) to navigating and launching programs in DOS? Do you remember writing simple .BAT files, perhaps on the root of your disk or the location where the OS happened to … | Continue reading
Today is finally D-day! My book The Creative Programmer is finally released as a “MEAP”, a Manning Early Access Release. That means exactly the same as the Early Access Steam releases such as Baldur’s Gate III—we’re still working on it, but you can check out the product now (1) a … | Continue reading
Wesley and Winnie Lim think about how websites die and website graveyards. What becomes of them after we’re gone? The same day I encountered those articles, Kristien stumbled upon a “what happens to my digital identity when you die?” article in a digital newspaper. It occurred to … | Continue reading
Yuvraj Singh recommended me Peter Burke’s The Polymath, a cultural history of “polymaths” from Leonardo Da Vinci to Susan Sontag. It sparked some thoughts that have been fermenting a while. I think it’s safe to open that bottle now. Defining a polymath The problem starts with Pet … | Continue reading
In recent years, the rise of nutritional labeling systems has colored the shelves of many supermarkets. Systems came and went, and in 2017, the government of France1 came up with yet another unified scoring system: the Nutri-Score. The goal is, as the official document states, to … | Continue reading
August 2022 is no more. August is typicallly an even slower month than July with most colleagues still on leave. Besides the yearly re-examinations, there’s ample time to catch up on the latest literature. Another major part of August—besides the traditional SIGSCE paper deadline … | Continue reading
Edward Lee wrote a piece at the ACM SIGBED (Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems) blog entitled The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science that struck a chord here. He starts out with a critical reflection on the rising habit of rejecting rather than accepting acade … | Continue reading
Yesterday, I turned thirty-seven. That’s also the fifth studio album of King Never. It’s also the 12th prime number. It’s also bound to turn up in one of pi’s decimal number sequences—a quick mental arithmetic (who am I kidding) says it should start at the 48th number. It’s also … | Continue reading
Rob O’Leary’s VS Code - what’s the deal with telemetry? made me re-evaluate our Pi-Hole setup I wrote about in February. One of the top blocked domains is incoming.telemetry.mozilla.org… Luckily, I’m not a VSCode user. Sublime still hasn’t let me down, and I barely use more than … | Continue reading
We humans tend not to share everything. Among the best kept—and probably most lied about—secrets is our salary, yet we still have the irresistible urge to brag and to compare. I was all the more surprised to stumble upon blogger and software engineer Jamie Tanna’s public salary h … | Continue reading
A couple of months ago, I read Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It And Use It For Life. As creativity is my research topic, I took some notes that seemed worth revisiting and pondering on today. The first thing you need to know about The Creative Habit is that it leans tow … | Continue reading
When you go out and buy something, are you the type that does so without blinking twice, or do you need the reassurance of the crowd? When in a bookstore, do you get out your GoodReads app on your smartphone to verify or reject your instincts, afraid to be disappointed afterwards … | Continue reading
Popular digital retro game store Good Old Games (GOG), does not really care about vintage PC hardware fans. That is my conclusion after watching GOG evolve from a superb retro PC game fixer to a giant struggling to compete with the Steam and Epic game stores, thereby also caterin … | Continue reading
In my monthly July 2022 overview write-up, I wrote: This website got a new search engine! The baked archives page used to be powered by Lunr.js, which has been replaced by Pagefind.app. I guess this is worth its own blog post, I’ll save the details for later. It’s time for those … | Continue reading
July 2022 is no more. Despite the absence of any teaching activities during the summer, things still move slow. Most colleagues I depend on are away, academic conferences like ITiCSE are planned in the summer and eat up time, and the heat has chipped away what was left of my over … | Continue reading
Here’s that long-promised write-up of our 2022 board game cupboard clearance–yay, lists! Yay, statistics! Since I’ve never done this kind of post before, it might be best to start off with a list—obviously—of everything we own, after cleaning up. From hereon, we could go forward … | Continue reading
After thinking about grading systems, it occurred to me that such a categorization could also be applied to the folders of my RSS reader. I’ve been fiddling with RSS on and off and eventually landed on a similar but simpler system that Ton Zijlstra calls feed reading by social di … | Continue reading
My Hacker News post Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs attracted the attention of Yuvraj Singh, who is putting together an ongoing collection of interviews with people who do interesting work—those are his words, not mine!. Raj has his interviews up at Syntopikon.com and was … | Continue reading
Our latest research had us draw yet another normal distribution graph of grades from 1 to 10. We’ve done that before, and it’s always interesting to see how uninteresting such a graph can be. Wait, what? Those bell curves, since they’re normal distributions, tend to concentrate o … | Continue reading
Paul Richardson munched his way around the world and wrote about it in Indulgence: Around the World in Search of Chocolate, part travelogue, part chocolate fetishism, and part British childhood nostalgia. I love reading books like this, and even if information scrutinized from bi … | Continue reading
The geeky but venerable Shut Up & Sit Down show now and then releases “special” videos next to their regular video reviews of all things board games. I’ve been catching up on those lovely bits of geekiness and especially enjoyed Tom’s 92(ish) Board Games (As Of March 2022), in wh … | Continue reading
Remember when I said creativity self-assessment is nonsense? We took a stab at designing a self-assessment test anyway. I still stand by my arguments: creativity is a socio-cultural construct, and thus, it’s mainly up to someone else to deem your work creative. Yet, that doesn’t … | Continue reading
Give Up GitHub!—a clear message that the Software Freedom Conservancy started spreading to open source software (FOSS) developers on 29 June via https://giveupgithub.org. Why? The whole story is available on their website, but the gist is that recently, GitHub yet again proved th … | Continue reading
In my The Modern QR Code Life rant, I briefly mentioned Farm Girl in Notting Hill, London, as a hipster place we ended up in four Saturday mornings ago, in pursuit of a good bowl of porridge. It turned out that Good was an understatement: it was superbly splendidly amazing. The i … | Continue reading
June 2022 is no more—this marks yet another midpoint of yet another year. June is traditionally a month filled with exam/master thesis/course project preparation and grading work. It’s the first time I’ve seen students' Android/Kotlin projects as this was the first year we’ve tau … | Continue reading
Finally, a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat ‘em up game arrived that aims to recapture the spirit of the nineties side-scrolling pixelated vibe that many arcade machines and home conversions offered—of which probably Turtles In Time is one of the most revered. Decent attempt … | Continue reading
Does this sound familiar to you? You attend a conference but mostly keep the casual conversations to the people you know anyway. Or how about trying to get coffee or a a fourth piece of cake—it’s free, right?—whilst carefully avoiding contact with other strange creatures lurking … | Continue reading
In October last year, I shared photos of my old and not so old mood boards that decorate the home office wall and serve as a reminder of who I was and sometimes still am. These aren’t the only relics that I decorated with things that interest me. Seven years ago, I designed these … | Continue reading
I love lists. I’m a real lists kind of person. I’m a big sucker for Top 20 Games Of All Time lists—that kind of click bait always works here, however good or bad the list itself. It kick-starts an internal discussion: what would my own top list look like? Can I compare list 1 wit … | Continue reading
A recent both refreshing and stressing trip to London made me painfully aware of bad technological integrations in everyday life. One of those painful devolutions in my opinion is the overuse of QR codes. I’m not a fan of QR codes and wrote about QR design mistakes before, but in … | Continue reading
We took a few days off to enjoy the local scenery and hiking trails, as good and as bad as my sprained ankle allowed for it. This may sound strange, but we usually take a wrong turn and get lost at least once during those short hikes. You’d think this is more common when explorin … | Continue reading
May 2022 is no more. May has been one of the driest months in decades here in Belgium, and while June traditionally announces summertime, temperatures have suddenly dropped and rain finally started to pour out—marginally. The weather continues to be unpredictable, strange, and ne … | Continue reading
The other day, we were looking for nearby flea markets to attend—it’s starting to become flea market season, rejoice! I remembered an ad when biking around our neighborhood but couldn’t remember the exact location (or the location of the ad itself). The internet to the rescue. Se … | Continue reading
Small and independent blogs are always full of … | Continue reading
Can a unified software engineering philosopy shape the right context in a curriculum? | Continue reading