With 2020 leaving me unsure if the Mayans were off by eight years, I have been doing whatever I can to stay busy. Aside from pouring myself into work, I have been working on my small game Draw! and tackling my project backlog.
One of the things my wife used to subscribe to was something called “The Skimm”. The Skimm was basically an aggregation of news that would get emailed to you every day. She really liked it, but I thought I could make something better for her. This was in 2015 so in true husband fashion, I took care of it in 2020.
Introducing, the Krimm
The Krimm (Kristen + Rudy Skimm) is similar to the Skimm, except heavily customized to my wife’s liking. Every morning at 8:30am, she gets an email with the top three news stories in each category she’s interested in, which includes a summary and a link to the full story. What I like in particular is the sources tend to be diversified, and the lack of images allows me to fit more information on the screen and her to be more objective as she’s choosing which stories look interesting hopefully based on substance rather than imagery.
How does it work?
It’s very simple. All I did was SSH into one of my servers and install Jarun’s “googler” utility which I use often and highly recommend. One of the flags on the library is to pull results from news sources only. Perfect.
From there, I made two simple bash scripts. One to run the utility for what she wants:
simplicity scales
and a one-liner to send the content of the generated text file to our emails with the subject “Today’s Krimm! 2020-06-01” (or whatever the date is 🙂) using postfix.
So, pretty simple. From there I set up a simple cron to run the make_file script at 8:29am at our local time in the system’s time and then I fire off the postfix email script at 8:30am.
So now, every day at 8:30am my wife gets a customized news feed from Google news consisting of the top 3 stories in the world from different sources based on keywords she’s interested in:
That’s it?
That’s it. It took me about an hour start to finish to hack this together, and she is satisfied with the result. I subscribed myself as well because well, hey, it’s pretty useful!
What else have you been doing?
Trying to stay sane. I have a really nice post in the works that I’ve been meaning to make about an enlightening conversation I had with one of my co-workers at Automattic. In the meantime, I also had the pleasure of interviewing the lead of the Handmade Network on their podcast:
This tale begins as most of the major changes in my life do during a sleepless night. It was about 3 in the morning and I was browsing YouTube videos in bed when I stumbled upon what is possibly the best dev log I’ve ever seen:
When professor rework showed up I just about lost it 🤣
I was laying there in disbelief between fits of laughter at what this guy was doing. Two years Thomas Randall has been working on this game. He started in Unreal Engine, Rewrote in C++, and then finally in pure C. He did everything over this period of time from completely redesigning the game’s architecture to teaching himself physics on the fly. He also moved his entire game into a new engine in a week.
Aside from the awesome flow and humor in the videos themselves (something about Aussie sarcasm is extra funny 😀) what really intrigued me was Randall’s commitment to his vision. As a programmer and game developer, I have settled time and time again like everyone else for various reasons: burnout, time constraints, money, external factors, you name it. Randall wasn’t willing to give an inch. He wants to make the game he sees in his mind and obviously doesn’t care about what it’s going to take to get there.
That kind of passion is contagious. As I watched more of Randall’s videos I started getting introduced to some other folks in Randall’s network via the videos. One of these guys is a fellow by the name of Ryan Fleury. Ryan developed the Telescope game engine Randall’s game currently lives in, and also created a custom tool called Data Desk for building and parsing C-like data components.
Ryan uses Data Desk in most of his software projects and I was blown away at the level of fidelity he was able to achieve in a 48 hour game jam with a limited 2d sprite sheet. It is seriously impressive. Highly recommend watching the first five minutes of the Jam:
This got me interested in what Ryan was working on and I came across his project “The Melodist” and again was simply blown away by the general difference in quality and attention to performance and optimization that was going into this project. I’ve made a few games, and a lot of software. I’ve played a lot of games and used a lot of software. This was next level stuff.
I reached out to Ryan to introduce myself and ask if he would be interested in “micro-mentoring” me. Ryan is kind of busy 🙂, but was kind enough to invite me to the Handmade Network.
The reception I have received since joining the Handmade Network community has been incredible. Handmade Network lacks the elitism or snobbishness I’ve seen in some development circles. Veterans of the community answer day 1 questions from new members or guests with the same respect and enthusiasm that they treat each other with. It’s kind of interesting because you would think folks that are doing things purposefully harder and putting invisible restrictions on themselves would feel a certain superiority. The opposite couldn’t be more true.
It was through this Network I started meeting other folks working on extremely interesting software with a high attention to detail on performance, customization, and portability.
This is something I’ve been curious about for years:
I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.
Modern cars work, let’s say for the sake of argument, at 98% of what’s physically possible with the current engine design. Modern buildings use just enough material to fulfill their function and stay safe under the given conditions. All planes converged to the optimal size/form/load and basically look the same.
Only in software, it’s fine if a program runs at 1% or even 0.01% of the possible performance. Everybody just seems to be ok with it. People are often even proud about how inefficient it is, as in “why should we worry, computers are fast enough”
This is especially true in Web where the landscape changes drastically and tempo can be unpredictable. One moment you’re living in a dollar sign world $ in jQuery and the next it’s all about React. One minute your project has 5 folders and the next you have thousands of node modules and GitHub is overloading mail servers sending you dependency security notifications every 5 seconds. It is madness.
All of this culminated in a few personal commitments. I have made a commitment to begin on the path of “getting closer to the metal” by developing new projects in lower level languages (particularly C) and committing myself to a greater understanding of how things actually work. Decades of abstraction and seemingly infinite storage space and processing speeds have led us here. I have also decided to participate where possible to the Handmade Network, contribute, and give back where possible. For example, one of the members: Allen Webster achieved what many programmers aspire to do: built his own editor called “4coder”. 4coder is exactly the type and quality of software that has me so intrigued with the Handmade community. There’s even a Handmade Network Podcast (it’s excellent btw) where some of these folks discuss their motivations for these projects and problems they solved along the way.
Through Handmade Network I have found all sorts of high quality developers and projects. Among these was a library called “Raylib” written by a guy named Ray from Barcelona, Spain. I was so impressed by the quality of Ray’s library (he has a whole suite of libraries, actually) and the levels at which he was willing to go to share his work. Aside from being under an extremely generous software license, Ray has worked tirelessly to ensure his software can be used at every level, on every platform, with virtually any utility.
I was once again moved by the passion I saw coming through in Ray’s project. Ray also actively communicates with folks interested in using his software and is extremely kind and open to working towards anything that will help someone have an easier time. It is for this reason that Ray is one of the solo developers I decided to donate to during this time of COVID-19 uncertainty:
Thank you very much Rudy for your generous donation! I trully appreciate it! I'm glad that you liked and enjoyed #raylib! As always, don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any doubt or any issue with the library! 😄 #opensource#gamedev#indiedev#codefunhttps://t.co/BjdzYeu6sN
Speaking of Raylib, the Raylib community recently held a 32×32 pixel game jam I decided to whip up a submission in about two days and enter! I found the constraints interesting: how cool can you make a game that has to fit in a 32×32 grid of individual “LED” and be 100% generated programmatically with zero external libraries outside of Raylib? Turns out, pretty cool:
Flappy Box – my Raylib game Jam submission programmed in C
While the game isn’t extremely graphically pleasing, it plays well and the entire executable program is 15kb!! For reference, the above GIF is 52 times larger than the game it’s displaying.
You can check out the source code (or grab the executable and play) here:
One of the cool things about making something like this is it could be easily transitioned into a hardware project. For example, very little would need to be changed to port this game onto a bookshelf, sort of like what this guy did with Tetris:
😎
I also plan on utilizing Ray’s suite of tools and other Handmade Network community projects and affiliations in my quest to create better software. In the meantime I will also be giving back to the community in other ways. For example, here’s a quick tutorial on creating your first project in 4coder on Windows:
The best way to help out Handmade Network and other Handmade projects is through the Handmade Fund. Other developers like Randall and Ray usually have other ways to give back if you like what they’re doing.
I’d like to encourage anyone who feels like donating during this time to consider folks who are making amazing open source software. If you don’t feel like donating, consider giving back by sharing links to the software, authors, and community. They deserve it.
