i'm eevee and this is my website. it's got toys and puzzles and articles about computers and other stuff i like
Visit eev.ee → RSS feedOn Hacker News May 2014 – Jul 2025
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I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff and put it online where other people could see it was pretty slick, but we did not have very much to work with. I’ve been taking for…
This Friday, June 12, will be my last day at Yelp. I don’t intend to look for another tech job. Or another job at all. Ever.
Not music nerds, obviously. I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it. The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve…
This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of events in recent history. Let me back up a bit.
I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed. Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a…
A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.
I spent a good chunk of the last four days installing an Internet web forum, which claims it can be up and running in 30 minutes. I like to think I’m pretty alright at computers. So what went wrong here? Well let me tell you.
I mentioned recently, buried in a post about UI changes, that Twitter’s latest earnings report included this bombshell: We are going to fix the broken windows and confusing parts, like the .@name syntax and @reply rules, that we know inhibit usag
I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…
Welcome to part 1 of this narrative series about writing a complete video game from scratch, using the PICO-8. This is actually the second part, because in this house (unlike Lua) we index from 0, so if you’re new here you may want to consult the introductory stuff and table of contents in part zero. If you’ve been…
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
Almost a year ago now, Jack Diederich gave a talk entitled “Stop Writing Classes“, in which he implores Python programmers to stop creating classes just for the hell of it, and specifically calls out the common pattern of a class with only a constructor/initializer and a single method—which should, of course, just be…
Ah, C. The best lingua franca we have… because we have no other lingua francas. Linguae franca. Surgeons general? C is fairly old — 44 years, now! — and comes from a time when there were possibly more architectures than programming languages. It works well for what it is, and what it is is a relatively simple layer of…
As often happens when you say something controversial, there have been some very adventurous interpretations of the essay I just wrote about economic inequality. I thought it might help clarify matters for the undecided if I tried to write a version so simple that it leaves no room for misinterpretation. “I wrote <a…
I love Doom. Or, well, I love Doom 2, which is the game we actually had when I was nostalgia years old. I love the aesthetic — pixely in a 3D(ish) environment, and consistent in a way that meshes together really well. The classic levels are abstract (occasionally too abstract), but still detailed enough to feel like…
I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is. I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve…
I assume you’ve read the introduction, which tells you the basics of putting a world together. This post is more narrative than mechanical; it’s a tour of my thought process as I try to turn my previous map into something a little more fun to play. I still touch on new editing things I do, but honestly, you already…
A familiar story: company makes product, product becomes wildly popular, company royally fucks product up. The most recent example of this is TimelineGate, but it’s something I’ve had on my mind for a while. Thus I present to you a list of complaints about personally-inconvenient UI changes, carefully disguised as a…
Creating a programming language is apparently all the rage these days, and it’s got me thinking about what I would really like to see in one. I’m starting to suspect the things I want are either impossible or mutually incompatible, so I’d better write them down and let smarter people tell me why I can’t have…
(This article has been translated into Spanish (PDF, with some additions) by Jorge Amado Soria Ramirez — thanks!) Preface I’m cranky. I complain about a lot of things. There’s a lot in the world of technology I don’t like, and that’s really to be expected—programming is a hilariously young discipline, and none of us