Recent (September)

Link-a-roo

Here are some links that I found cool/interesting:

• https://learngitbranching.js.org/ : interactive and visual way of learning Git. Much easier to approach than git’s documentation.
• https://100.atnfu.me : from the legend himself, Anthony Fu’s 100 day challenge of making fun, cool and sometimes interactive visuals.
• https://withblue.ink/2020/05/17/how-and-why-to-sign-git-commits.html : nice explanation of how & why you should sign your git commits.
• https://andybrewer.github.io/mvp/ : a plug & play stylesheet. No classes!
• https://alexanderell.is/posts/websockets-from-scratch/ : “writing a websocket server from scratch”. I dream that I someday have the time and patience to write one myself in Zig.

MATH

This is a trivial topic for many, but let’s say you want to “map” the range 0 to 1500, to a range of -1 to 1. How would you do that? Let’s make it a bit more “interesting”, but let’s say you don’t want a linear mapping but rather something more smooth.

This is a long winded way of saying that I truly appreciate simple calculus mathematics. The above can be done with a sigmoid function. Again, a bit trivial, but at times it seems like magic.

Here’s an example of when you might want to use a sigmoid function. Let’s say you want to map the coordinates of your mouse to some sort of element transform or value. Often these are not as big as the value of the mouses’ x position (which can be in the thousands). Using a simple function like:

  function sigmoid(z) {
    return (5 / (1 + Math.exp((z-750)/50))) - 1;
  }

Would allow you essesntially transform the mouses x-coordinate (or y) values to something more suitable for HTML/CSS properties, and not in a linear pattern that can sometimes be disorienting with animations.

Git

Gitting gud is one of my developer goals. Here’s an awesome squasher:

  git reset --soft HEAD~3 &&
  git commit

No git rebase or git merge --squash! Wonderful. Taken from this Stackoverflow thread: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5189560/how-do-i-squash-my-last-n-commits-together

Games

Splatoon 3 was released this last week and with me trying to keep up with the times, I decided to purchase it. Not being a regular gamer, Splatoon was challenging right off the bat. Unlike some other other shooters I am used to, Splatoon & its players recommend you use the controllers gyroscope to aim rather than just the right joy stick. I’ve been trying to “stick” to this, but it’s pretty challenging and I still have yet to see the benefits. The game is still very fun however.