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System Architecture for Edaqa’s Room

By mortoray on 2021-04-15 • ( Leave a comment )

Highly inefficient invisible animations (CSS/Firefox/Chrome/React)

By mortoray on 2021-01-16 • ( 1 Comment )

High-Throughput Game Message Server with Python websockets

By mortoray on 2020-12-06 • ( 1 Comment )

What I look for while play-testing

By mortoray on 2020-11-23 • ( Leave a comment )

How to write a custom selector in React

By mortoray on 2020-08-16 • ( Leave a comment )

I Wrote an Online Escape Game

By mortoray on 2020-07-31 • ( Leave a comment )

Is reference counting slower than GC?

By mortoray on 2016-05-24 • ( 8 Comments )

“Reference counting is slower than garbage collection”, a claim often made in the discussion of memory management. I heard it again recently when discussing Leaf; somebody took issue with my arguments against […]

What is the cost of reference counting?

By mortoray on 2016-05-18 • ( 8 Comments )

Reference counting is a common form of memory management. In some languages, like Python, it’s the natural way objects are tracked, and in others it’s in the standard library, such as shared_ptr […]

What is the length of a string? A tricky question

By mortoray on 2016-04-28 • ( Leave a comment )

Every day millions of programmers require the length of a string. Despite this there is no universal definition of what string.length actually represents. It changes between languages, and quite often doesn’t return […]

A pan, zoom, and rotate gesture model for touch devices

By mortoray on 2016-03-16 • ( Leave a comment )

No mobile app would be complete without a few gestures. I already had swiping in place, so now I turned my attention to panning, zooming, and rotation. These nicely round out of […]

Efficient open ended queues with deferred deletion

By mortoray on 2016-03-07 • ( 3 Comments )

Queues are a common part of modern software. Scheduling jobs and actions isn’t just for distributed systems, but for any system dealing with external events or asynchronous processing. It’s easy to grab […]

The simple things matter – examples of UX failure from Amazon Video

By mortoray on 2016-02-26 • ( 3 Comments )

Good products can be hampered by relatively minor design issues. After a long period of development it’s often tempting to push something through the door despite its flaws. It is important to […]

How blaming the user leads to tragedy

By mortoray on 2016-02-19 • ( Leave a comment )

On 9 February human error resulted in 11 deaths and 80 further casualties in tragic wreck near Bad Aibling, Germany. Despite a supposedly robust safety system, a lone operator was capable of […]

API forensics for iOS system time: missing documentation

By mortoray on 2016-02-05 • ( Leave a comment )

I started using the mach_absolute_time function on iOS to get proper event timing information. It works well, I think; the problem is that I actually don’t know what this function is supposed […]

The trouble with `floor` and `ceil`

By mortoray on 2016-01-05 • ( 12 Comments )

floor and ceil have the bad habit of producing unexpected results. They aren’t broken, but in light of floating point nasties can often result in a number that’s ±1 of the desired […]

Implementing a Swipe gesture

By mortoray on 2015-12-15 • ( Leave a comment )

I recently implemented a swipe gesture for Fuse. The gesture recognition itself, though complex, was not hard to implement; I had most of the needed pieces already. Designing a user friendly, declarative […]

The hard part of error handling is not the error itself

By mortoray on 2015-12-03 • ( Leave a comment )

Are our discussions about errors focusing on the right part of the problem? We tend to argue about what exceptions mean, or how return values are messy. But if I look at […]

Why don’t we have runtime virtual dispatching?

By mortoray on 2015-11-23 • ( 10 Comments )

Virtual functions are a great feature, but they have a rather severe limitation. They can only be implemented by extending the definition of all classes involved. A lot of operations on classes […]

Everything can and will go wrong: all functions fail

By mortoray on 2015-11-06 • ( 14 Comments )

In a dreamy programming utopia, functions behave correctly and nothing unexpected ever happens. In technical reality however even the most mundane of actions can suffer failures and errors. It’s a misguided notion […]

The exceptional myth of non-local flow

By mortoray on 2015-10-28 • ( 9 Comments )

“Exceptions are bad because they introduce non-local flow into a program.” It’s an argument I’ve seen often and it even came up in the comments in my previous article. It’s nonsense though. […]

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  • System Architecture for Edaqa’s Room
  • Highly inefficient invisible animations (CSS/Firefox/Chrome/React)
  • High-Throughput Game Message Server with Python websockets
  • What I look for while play-testing
  • How to write a custom selector in React

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