Blog

Simply Training Yearly Report #1

It is one year ago that I released Simply Training, so I wrote a short report of how things developed over that year. It all started with the release announcement:

JavaScript Date

I recently used the Date builtin to implement some date/time manipulation in JavaScript. Some parts of it were quite surprising. I think API design is an important part of programming, so I decided to share this with you. Maybe you can learn something from it.

Microsoft Sponsoring EuroPython 2020

I dislike corporate influence on conferences. Advertisements, booths for attracting fresh talent and sponsored talks are just distasteful to me. To be fair, venues are expensive and organizing conferences is a lot of work, so the money has to come from somewhere. That's why corporate sponsorships exist.

This year's EuroPython was sponsored by many companies, including Microsoft. I think accepting Microsoft as a sponsor crossed a boundary that better stays uncrossed.

Citrus Pasta

Today I improvised some pasta with ingredients I had at home. I really liked the taste, so I decided to write the recipe down.

Advances in DIY Dance Pad Technology

I spent a lot of time modding my dance pad, so I decided to write about it. Maybe it can help other people that want to mod their own pad.

Staying out of Politics

The life of all people is affected by politics: Are you allowed to marry your chosen partner? Do you have a right to vote? Do you have to be scared to be abused or even killed when you are on your way to work? What about healthcare, taxes, education, immigration, public infrastructure and crime prevention? All this is governed by politics. People don't exist in a vacuum, they have to co-exist. Many decisions influence more than one person, so they have to be taken together. That's what politics is all about.

Let's Give It a Go

And with "Go" I mean "golang", the popular programming language developed at a company known for its even more popular search engine (and its unquenchable thirst for user data). I would like to share a few observations I made when using the language for the first time.

Optimizing for Size

Many modern C compilers offer the option of optimizing the code you are compiling. That's great. You write your code and the compiler takes care of making it run fast for you. But sometimes you don't need your compiler to produce a program that runs as fast as possible, but to generate the smallest binary size. Compression of some sort, if you apply that term liberally.

USB Polling Rate Adventure

I like dance games, that's no secret. But recently I had some problems with my dance pad: getting those "Fantastics" was just too damn hard.

At first I, of course, assumed that it was just me being bad at the game, but then I started investigating.