Richard's Blog

I have been playing around with WebAssembly a bit. I set an example up that draws balls bouncing around the canvas using SDL. The code is at https://github.com/ranton256/wasm_bounce and you can see it in action on this page.

Given the large number of recent technology industry layoffs and general economic conditions I put together an article with advice and resources for interview preparation and job search to try and be of some utility.

I have been working on some OpenGL projects lately. One is a setup tutorial for Macs for Xcode using glfw and glew. The setup is always a bit fiddly to me and has changed since the last time I went through it, so I created a separate GitHub repo for just the setup part and a small spinning triangle. It's available at https://github.com/ranton256/mac_opengl_setup_example

The second project is more interesting. I just wanted to get a relatively decent rendering setup going with some actual mesh models. I reused the SMF reading code from some grad school projects to load a few more interesting objects, and also coded in mesh generation for cubes, spheres, and pyramids. It uses Blinn-Phong shading and texture mapping. Several of the textures are generated procedurally using Perlin noise or a checkers pattern and several are loaded from PNG files. The libpng loading code is self-contained and probably useful to others.

During the holidays I wrote up some of my experiences and thoughts on how to run effective developer teams, mostly focused on testing, CI/CD, and using reviews and transparency to promote a culture of learning. It's available on LinkedIn at Strategy for Effective and Efficient Developer Teams

In order to show how fun (and visual) algorithms can be, I pulled together some visual examples and code for some of my favorite fractals

I finally got around to sharing the game I created with my kids a few years ago. It's a simple space invaders style game written in Python with Pygame Zero to help them learn about coding. We also used PyInstaller to create a distributable version. The binaries are in itch.io at https://ranton.itch.io/timmy for Mac and PC, and the source code is on GitHub at https://github.com/ranton256/timmy. I also put the lessons I wrote for them on programming, Linux, and Python up in a separate GitHub repo, https://github.com/ranton256/python_lessons. Hopefully these are useful to other beginners.

This post discusses some approaches for influencing others to get alignment on plans and designs in technical organizations. http://www.ranton.org/g/influencing_as_tech_leader

Today I finally got around to finishing an article I wrote around time management since I had been asked for tips on this and how I manage my calendar at work. You can view it at http://www.ranton.org/g/time-management-tips.

I recently took a course, CS 636, at Drexel on advanced rendering techniques. The project work was focused on ray tracing which was quite fun. You can see my final results and links to more information at Ray Tracing page.

I started a site recently to play around with Ghost CMS a bit, and for something of interest content wise I decided to make it about philosophy and inspirational quotes. This morning I wrote a short article around Epictetus, my favorite Stoic philosopher. I hope others will find it helpful. Stoicism has brought me some measure of peace and calm over the past few years.

I have found myself in a lot of conversations lately talking about SLOs and related things so I decided to put down my thoughts on why bother with them and why they are useful.

I wrote an article about some of my favorite books on leadership.

Revamped my site to use new style, and serve as static site generated with Flask instead of Django.

I am fond of the programming language Lua. I have put together some useful resources for aspiring Lua programmers up at luasprite.com which is the site for a book I am working on for beginning programmers using Lua plus some support C graphics code using SDL.

Back in 2009 I wrote myself a nice little interpreted language as a learning exercise named Meme which I finally got around to putting up on the site.

Meme

New ranton.org

I finally got around to updating my site, and it's now powered by Python and Django instead of PHP which makes me much happier.