I'm back!

So, after a three year hiatus on postings I'm here again! Yaay!

This post will be the first of a short-ish recap of past highlights and future plans, of which I am quite excited. I will also try and keep the posts shorter but more frequent.

Professional life changes

Halfway through that time I changed employer, and managed to learn quite a few new tricks at the new place. I'm still doing software development, but as a consultant, which has exposed me to a lot of new people, places, projects, PLC:s and PowerPoints. (And companies, languages, APIs and hardware, but those don't start with a p. ;)

My current job is as a (heavily developing) systems architect at Bit Addict. The company is lead by an old friend of mine from the university days, and I signed on as peon #1. We've grown from 2 to 5 people in 1,5 years and are targeting around 8-10 in a few years. We're doing software work for manufacturing & automation companies, ranging from ERP-integrations all the way to safety hardware installation. Our customer are pretty high tech, high power lasers (4-6 kW), titanium 3D printers or surgery simulations, so the applications are quite exciting.

Nevertheless, the best part is that we're out there, doing good work that our customers appreciate and building a company and relations by our own. A lot is being learnt, but as long as one avoids making the same mistake twice, it's all part of the process.

Reminiscing...

I suggested the name of the company as I used the same name for a small PC demo a friend and I did together for DreamHack 1997 (this was back in high-school). This, kids, was when all we had to play with was a framebuffer and a weak CPU. No libraries, APIs or GPUs or whatnots. It was all our own code, except for the music-player, the VGA-mode setter, and a bit of interpolation code we got from his big brother.

You can still download and run it in a DOS emulator if you want to. It's not that good, honestly, but as we came in 3rd place out of 7-ish entries,  I suppose a tiny bit of pride is in order. This was back when there was about 400 attendees with their own computers, as opposed to 9500 last year (2015).

It's a different world today, since the competition is more about creativity than technology, but looking at 4K or 64K demos never fails to impress.

I actually got a huge flashback to the demo scene days by playing TIS-100 over the holiday (christmas gift from a friend, thanks Nix!). The fun part if the game is sitting and optimizing a program until it is as small, fast or efficient as it can be. The downer is that I can't fool my brain into thinking it's a game all the time, thus it feels a bit close to work at times. Still, good fun and recommended to anyone who've done a bit of assembler hacking in their youth.

My next post will be about ... Home Automation!  .. Starring a raspberry pi... Stay tuned.

TTFN.

Status update

My main occupation these days is as executive of damage control, for a 1y old toddler.  Doing so leaves precious little time and brain power for any creative software work.

Whatever free time I get I tend to use for gaming/surfing, which is what my spare brain cycles allows for. It's plain hard to  regularly find some dedicated time for creative work, when your brain is trying to cope with the mood swings and antics of someone who has to program her neural network by trial and error. :)

So, the going-ons in my software world (outside work) are rather slim:

• BuildBot is ticking along fine without me, although I'm trying to do a bit of pull request checking, since  Dustin Mitchell, "chief maintainer", needs some offloading on that part.
• ThrustRacer remains a concept and dream. I've had some doubts as to whether twitchy arcade games can be as good on mobile devices as they were in the golden age of the Tac-2, thus wondering if I should spend my time thinking on thinking about something else instead.
• TF2 is fun, but kinda hard unless you find a server with comparable players. Ranking, seeding and matching is sorely needed. I had to by a new high-DPI mouse to be at least vaguely competitive
• Skyrim is .. scary .. and buying the discount PC-version on Steam over the overprices PS3 version was not as good an idea as it first sounded. I need a new graphics card, which costs way more! (OTOH, might help with TF2). The scariness (i.e. I'm really afraid to see what will come at me next...) is a problem though, since I play at night/evenings (ref. above mentioned toddler) and playing in the dark, quiet and trying to quickly go asleep afterwards doesn't really mix well. (Still haven't finished BioShock, nor seen Alien 1 to completion...)
• Our (recently acquired) house sorely needs more power and Ethernet outlets, a small herd of Ardunio boards controlling all the light fixtures and a motorized garage door.

Ah, the woes of geekdom and fatherhood combined...

Two good links

Just for fun, but you really ought to read SinFest. My favourite webcomic keeps getting better and better. New comic every day since the start.

Also, Broken Picture Telephone is a very fun take on the old whispering game of miscommunication. Describe a picture, draw the description, repeat until satsified. See results. (The site has some problems, so you can't even connect to donate some times. Best to try it when the US is sleeping. :)

The singularity is coming...

I've begun re-reading the book Accelerando by Charles Stross. The first half is pretty mind-boggling and fascinating and definitely worth a read if you're into software development, sci-fi and wonder where humanity is going. The latter half falters a bit as the story is trying to wrap itself up, but if you only manage the first part I hope you'll still found it worthwhile.

It resonates well with Ray Kurzweil's talk on TED.com, which I've just watched. Even though the video is old news (being from 2005 and released in 2006) I feel it needs to be spread a bit more. I guess we're not at the point where everyone knows everything new within a few weeks, but I wager that the time for spreading news is shrinking in the same way as everything else. :)

If you haven't heard about universal exponential growth or the singularity: watch the talk and, if you fell intrigued, read the book. Period.

R2D2!

Must... control... credit card! :)

(see this link)