This week, Rock Paper Shotgun presented their best games to play on the PC today list or the RPS 100 (2024), another interesting PC video game top 100 list. Another heavily biased top 100 list, which calls for a good doze of armchair scientific analysis to determine exactly how reliable this list is. I do like the presentation of the list: click...
Remember when I said that if you muddle with vintage hardware mixtures, one thing gets fixed but the other has a very big tendency to break? I was trying to save this for the PicoGUS post but that’ll have to wait as debugging the current problem is giving me a headache. You see, I kind of sort of maybe perhaps broke my Vintage Sound Blaster 16. I...
These past few days we’ve been greeted with a damp, cold mist: finally autumn is really here. Last week’s Halloween was celebrated with a local organized stroll through the park obstructed by everything scary that the organizer’s minds could think of. During the day, the walk was supposed to be child-friendly, but the masks managed to evoke...
It took me more than two months to finally unwrap that eBay present containing a Pine Technology PT-428 baby AT Socket 3 motherboard. The original one in the 486 case, a PCChips M602, died on me this summer. Well, died is perhaps a bit exaggerated: the keyboard suddenly refused to be recognized and the HDD controller started getting funky. Since...
As I wrote in last year’s Coping With Loss, just before my wife gave birth to our daughter, my father-in-law passed away. Needless to say, last year has been very hard—and to a certain extend, this year as well. We’re nineteen months later now and the resulting grief still hits us when we least expect it to, as in a sudden wave that brutally...
Here’s a dilemma. As a (freelance) software developer, should you specialize in one development stack or go wide by learning to be proficient in many different technologies? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and have yet to reach a definitive stance on the matter. I’m a generalist but our society seems to promote specialists. I like...
And I blame Henrique—and, to a lesser degree, Luk, as he’s the one I made fun of for carring that small colourful keyboard everywhere (another NuPhy Air 75). Somehow, for some reason, I never gave keyboards that much thought. How weird considering typing is how I make money and has been for the last 17 years. Huh. It seems to be a self-expression...
The Good Old Days relaunched last month with version 8 and I spent last week dissecting the changes from the new theme made by Mr. Creosote as it’s always fun to get inspired. They also have a museum page where you can go back in time to see what the site looked like back in the day. One of the things I really like is the way The Good Old Days...
Getting timely posts out there in the open is becoming a bit of a challenge, it seems. Nonetheless, it’s still early October, so here’s my overview of stuff I’ve hauled back from last month’s internet spelunking. I’m also lagging behind my RSS reads so this haul is not as big as it could have been, but hey, it’s not exactly a contest. Previous...
Bill from The Retro Sofa claims that the original Legend of Zelda is Unplayable in 2024 and wonders why that is and what we can do about it. That video was a very timely Stumble Upon as a week ago Florian from the DOS Game Club had: […] this idea of starting reading old game magazines and experiencing the hardware and games from the era “in...
As an extension of last week’s A Historical Summary of My Music Tastes, I kept thinking about the many ways hip hop and other genres I started getting interested in intertwined. You’ve got your conventional hard rap tracks and the more gentle ones I already laid out a few years ago and for some reason keep going back to, meaning it must somehow...
Here’s me finding yet another cool blog, this time by Aaron Giles, a programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer. We’re off to a good start here, I love people who dabble in multiple disciplines. Aaron describes how he ended up with a thousand music CDs, how he re-ripped them all in a lossless format, and as a bonus, summarized his...
It’s been September for a good week now, I know, but you’ll have to forgive me as I’m running a bit behind my usual blog post cadence. The sudden drop in temperature makes it painfully clear that the summer of 2024 is gone, which is fine considering our garden has been ransacked by excavators and other machines. Not entirely fine, though: our...
Did you know that according to various easy to find sources, the total CO2 emissions as a by-product of producing cement and concrete account for more than 10% of the total emissions we as humans are responsible for? By expanding our house, we have made our humble contribution to that. Our World In Data visualized yearly annual CO2 emissions from...
I turned thirty-nine today: the start of the last 365 days of my youth, according to too many people who sent me a quick happy birthday message. As if I needed a reminder. Should I get myself a big bike next year? I don’t think the mid-life crisis will make a full frontal assault next year. Judging by the average life span of people close to me,...
It’s been a couple of months since my 486 motherboard gave up after I tried refitting it into the case with makeshift AT style motherboard standoffs. A PS/2 keyboard connector proved that the keyboard still works, and Vogons search results proved that flickering and then dead keyboard LEDs are signs of a possibly dud port, but I don’t have the...
Mike Sass compiled a list of 36 assorted things, topping Nic Lake’s 35 things, so I figured I will be doing Mike a big favour by creating a list of 37 things. Here goes. The pistachio flavour servers the best quality check for any self-respected ice cream parlour. Why do my feet feel so great after clipping my toe nails? (Because you can hear...
On May 2023, we received an at first dubious parcel that turned out to be twenty-five copies of my book The Creative Programmer to celebrate its English release in print. Well, last Friday, I received another strange parcel, this time coming from Japan, and containing three copies of the fully translated Japanese edition! I’m officially a...
July is no more: we’re officially half-way through the summer vacation of 2024. I’ve been doing my best to keep on writing on my blogs but The Parent Trap is making it very challenging. The less time I spent writing, the more restless I become. I kept my journal and fountain pens within reach but it pains me to not use them often enough. At least...
We’ve always firmly said no when people asked us if we ever wanted to have kids. I guess something must have gone wrong: tomorrow, our daughter will be sixteen months old. I blame those summer get-togethers where our friends bring their kids along and our stone-cold hearts warm up for a brief period when all those toddlers and children are...
Robert Birming started collecting links to interesting and inspiring blogging journeys of which most are /timeline “slash pages”. He was kind enough to include a link to my /museum page, even though technically speaking, that’s not my blogging journey but more broadly speaking my internet presence journey. But what exactly is the difference? When...
Two years ago, I initiated a yearly recurring thing called The Board Game Shelf Analysis that hasn’t yet recurred so I figured it’s about time to change that. Here’s the summer 2024 edition of the Board Game Shelf Analysis that’s hopefully going to be a yearly series now! This time, I don’t want to go into the whole grading debate, but rather...
Remember that time when after downloading and installing WinZip using Internet Explorer, the next thing on the list was fetching the latest ICQ Wise installer from the Mirabilis website? No? I’ll oblige with another hint in case the memory needs a bit of a jog: Toc-toc-toc… Uh-oh1. On August 2001, my ICQ nickname—I still know my number by heart:...
Luk Weyens over at Pensive Ibex (RSS feed here) wrote a great piece on educational games from his childhood and the sweet memories that come with them. As warped and full of holes these joyful memories might be, which I experienced myself while trying to piece together my own list of these kinds of games, these became a part of the essential me....
Did you know that if you write a lengthy blog post of say a thousand words twice a week for fifty out of fifty-two weeks, you’ll end up with a hundred thousand words, which is longer than the average book? Even if you can’t muster the discipline, getting beyond 80k isn’t particularly difficult to pull off. I always try to aim for a thousand words...
Although the summer vacation has officially begun, it’s still barely visible thanks to a seemingly uninterrupted series of rainy days. Kees van der Leun shared another graph showing 123 years of cumulative precipitation between October and June. The Highest so far was 700 mm. This year is almost 1000 mm. We’re desperate for a few rays of...
Four years ago, in the post A Personal Journey Through the History of Webdesign I introduced the concept of the Brain Baking Museum: a place where you could re-experience my very first website from 1998 and see it evolve throughout the years to what now is Brain Baking and its retro gaming counterpart Jefklak’s Codex. I moved the museum to its...
About a month ago, I bought a PicoGUS, an ISA Gravis UltraSound sound card emulator that aims to fit comfortably in-between conventional eighties expansion cards. My first intention was to slot it into the Win98 machine next to the Sound Blaster Audigy to work as my DOS mode MIDI maestro—until I found out the motherboard doesn’t have ISA slots...
My wife is a big fan of Australia’s biggest export product—no wait, she’d rather spread a thick layer of Nutella instead of Vegemite on that slice of bread. We Belgians are chocolate addicts after all. Now where was I? Right, export product. She loves gossiping about what she calls “MAFs” or Married at First Sight. We have our own bland...
After four years of faithful service, I’m retiring the brainbaking-minimal website theme. I got tired of the clean look. It didn’t spark joy and I didn’t really like looking at my website any more: the minimal theme perhaps became too clean. The more other personal blogs I discovered with popping colours screaming personality, the more depressed...
For a Go project we’re working on, the ever-increasing boilerplate code yet again started getting on my nerves. This seems to be a recurring story in enterprise software projects written in Go, but I digress. This time, the question is: how to do proper database transaction management, the idiomatic Go way? The thing we were trying to solve must...
Brain Baking has been powered by the static site generator Hugo for a good decade now. Everything I’ve written and published here has come to fruition with the help of Sublime Text and Hugo. Yet in 2021 I started using another Markdown-powered editor called Obsidian to edit my digital notes before they make it to this blog. The inevitable...
The remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door released a couple of weeks ago—the same Paper Mario that’s on my Top 25 Best Games of All Time list. Naturally, I didn’t have to think twice to consider buying it, and naturally, as a person who prefers holding the real deal to an eShop release, I wanted to bike to a store as a welcome break from...
It’s June, and it looks like it’s November. We’ve never had that much bad weather in years, and doesn’t look like it’s getting any better. Although admittedly Sunday was quite pleasant with a sunray or two finally managing to break through. We went to the 2024 Dutch Pen Show hosted in a hotel in Utrecht, The Netherlands and enjoyed the sun while...
I miss BSD/Linux. Or was that GNU/Unix, I’m not sure? Silly jokes to get a statistical minority reading this on the edge of their seat aside, I do miss it. It’s still out there, but no longer in here, so what happened? In 2007, work happened, permanently putting a hold on endless Fvwm reconfigurations and the growing of custom Linux kernel...
Not of fine wine and frothing beer, but of mood souring rain. The groundwater levels have hit an all-time high, almost beating 2021’s gigantic summer rainfall that resulted in the local waterways overflowing, and an hour drive away even transforming complete cities into brown floaty drab. Hey dude, where’s my car? Perhaps it’s Tthat pointy thing...
After fiddling with various ways to sync notes across multiple vaults and iterating on my local data backup strategy, I figured I needed a new overview on the current design and the tools involved. I tried to keep things as simple and as low-friction as possible, with varied success, as you can see in the following naive attempt to draw the...
Joel recently shared a treasured memory of his first contact with emulation, which was a very timely post as early May’s Retronauts episode 609 also happened to be about the past and current state of emulation. These made me reflect on my relationship with emulation and how I first got into the retro gaming hobby. I grew up with a Game Boy...
A bit late to the party, but hey, it’s May! And just like the previous month flew by, I have no idea what actually happened besides the fact that the total and utter chaos at work combined with the naughty pranks of our toddler-to-be completely drained my batteries. I have to admit that I don’t really enjoy the cranky person I’m becoming because...
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Jeremy Jung of the Software Engineering Radio podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #614, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Jeremy summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneveld, author of The Creative Programmer and [former] PhD researcher at...
Time for another design mistake, this time from our new Internet Service Provider (ISP). We switched last week because I required a business subscription as part of the cost-optimization plan. In Belgium, there’s very little choice when it comes to ISPs, with two giants completely dominating the market: Proximus and Telenet. We used to have a...
It took a very long time to finally add a new entry in the personal phone history matrix, and I’m quite proud of that. My last smartphone, a hand-me-down Sony XZ1 Compact, was eventually rooted and flashed with LineageOS, significantly prolonging its lifespan. In fact, the phone was still perfectly serviceable, so why buy a new one? Because I...
My Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system has hit a new wall since I started taking notes on my work laptop in a new Obsidian Vault. How do you sync notes across devices? The Obsidian Help page doesn’t beat around the bush: either use Obsidian Sync—their proprietary add-on that lets you store and sync your notes on their servers—or, since the...
Or should that be invasiveness? Persuasiveness? It’s no longer a distraction, it’s an addiction, it’s everywhere, and its aggressive promotion and passive acceptance is driving me crazy. I’m walking around on campus where students don’t look up while walking but down—desperately trying to catch every single glimpse of their backlit screen. Its...
I’ve been known to (re)play old games—sometimes in new engines, sometimes on original hardware. The latest games to fit that bill are Duke Nukem 1 + 2 as part of the Duke Nukem Evercade Collection 1 where an amazing feat was pulled off by completely rewriting the engine to support smooth scrolling on the Evercade widescreen handheld. If you press...
What happened in March? Can you believe that my head feels like the Belgian weather of late: damp and very cloudy? I tried keeping my head above water in the complete chaos at work. I gave more talks about my creativity research. Kev and I exchanged lots of friendly emails as part of his monthly PenPal project. We talked about academia, baking,...
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the point of screwing out the PCB, decapping the chips and trying to reverse-engineer the ROM—I’m sure that’s interesting too—but just on a basic mechanical level. Companies like VTech and Clementoni apply simple but clever techniques for their systems to...
In the programming language Go, it’s very easy to build something using high-level concurrent patterns thanks to the concept of Goroutines and channels used to signal between them. A Goroutine is essentially a coroutine that maps onto green threads that map onto real native threads on your OS in an NxM way. The simple go func() prepend-style...
The nameservers of brainbaking.com have changed, from Cloudflare back to my trusty local hosting/domain provider. Since the DDoS attack of last year, I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare to more resiliently catch dumb fuckups of people with questionable ethical motivations, as Cloudflare does a couple of things for you out of the box: it uses an...
We’re out of olive oil. Again. I don’t know why, but these dark green glass bottles always seem to be empty earlier than expected. My friend Luk over at Pensive Ibex buys his in the form of a big 5 l barrel directly through the farmer, and he claims that’s enough for about a year. He couldn’t believe we go through these bottles that quickly and...
The site stats tell me that my about page at /about is consistently one of the most visited pages on this website. That confirms what everyone already knows: people are very curious, sometimes even nosy. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m just as nosy as my visitors: I love clicking on About Me buttons as soon as I see one, and I’m disappointed...
It’s been three years since the first desk setup post from 2021, and while a couple of things have changed, nothing major has. The preservationist in me wanted to post an update nonetheless, so here goes. The Desk The desk setup: an overview. The room is still small, the computers stayed the same, and hiding cables is still an...
I came across a weird function in our Go codebase the other day. It was supposed to do just one thing but accidentally did a bit more—you know how this goes. Suppose you’re validating some business rule and need to fetch a bit of data to do so: func (s *Service) IsPeriodInvoicable(ref EntityRef) (bool, string, string, error) { beginP, err :=...
My first month back in the software engineering industry as an independent software architect is behind me. I’m still adjusting to the big change of pace. The paper work involved to set up a company (besloten venootschap or bv) in Belgium took longer than I anticipated and there’s still administration to do, but at least my first invoice left my...
Ana Rodrigues too deleted her Spotify account, citing numerous valid reasons (see my You Shouldn’t Listen To Spotify post), of which one in particular stood out for me: Spotify is bad for the environment. She cites Natalia Waniczek’s FFConf 2022 talk where Natalia presented painful facts such as: If you were to listen to an album 27 times back to...
I’ve openly proclaimed my dislike for current trends in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) before: it’s being misused to genereate crap to put on the internet and the availability of hallucinated crap makes students’ learning painfully worse. So I’ve been wondering: can these ChatGPT-like systems be put to any real use? I think the answer is...
In retrospect of several creative endeavors, on average, I feel like I spend 25% of my time creating, and 75% hustling. I don’t think that’s a healthy balance at all: it should be 60%+ creating and 40% or less hustling. Yet in this world where uninterrupted yelling is the norm to get your stuff to sell, it seems that I have little choice. This ad...
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue screen or need for electricity only adds to that experience. But board games also allow you to give in to that creative urge: instead of playing with the flimsy cardboard components, why don’t you craft your own? Pimp Your Board Games! It makes little...
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Henry Suryawirawan of the Tech Lead Journal podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #161, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Henry summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneveld is a software engineer, computer science education researcher, and...
The first month of the new year came and went, and with it, surprise flurries of snow, episodes of frozen slippery fun, and sudden peaks in temperature once more confusing our shrubberies that are budding way to soon. It was my last month at the university (see why I am leaving academia), which felt especially bittersweet considering the fluency...
As an electrical and mechanical engineer, my late father-in-law was an expert in crafting home-grown black boxes that meticulously—and sometimes also miraculously—executed certain tasks in and around the house, such as automatically opening and closing the curtains based on the position of the sun (that included LEGO Technic radar work), routing...
Thanks to the multi billion dollar advertisement industry, searching for something on the internet has devolved from a joyous Altavista guess-the-keywords activity to a tiring chore where one has to wade through endless pools of generated SEO-optimized crap, hollow company blogs with more social media link embeds than actual content, and Reddit...
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop that came pre-installed with Windows 11. I thought that was a good idea since we were looking for an easy-to-use operating system. I was wrong. This post is a reminder to myself that, next time someone needs to be introduced to the world of digital bureaucracy, I should instead install a Linux distribution. I...
First, I really wanted to leave. Afterwards, I didn’t want to. Then, I was paralyzed and didn’t know which route to take. Now, I’m just glad a decision has finally been made, and I can move on. After five and a half years, I am leaving academia. In this post, I scramble to gather my thoughts as to why. Brace yourself for an incoming wall of...
We’ve been keeping track of our household expenses on and off over the past decade—more off than on as it’s yet another huge chore to pour everything in tables and extract useful information out of it. At first, we scribbled everything in a big expenses notebook, but after a year of frantically trying to write down every transaction, that simply...
In one of the buildings at our university campus, a big TV screen next to the staircase tried (in vain) to educate students on how to correctly send emails by listing dos and dont’s. The funny examples convinced me to stop and read what was being displayed, for the first time in more than five years since I take those stairs, but judging from the...
A few months ago, Laurens, a colleague from another department, successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection on FPGA. Laurens is a hardware engineer and spent the last four years finding ways to speed up network intrusion detection using machine learning on programmable hardware or FPGAs. I know...
Sometimes, the things that I write about are part of a series. For instance, the game Wario Land II is part of the Mario/Wario Land series, of which I’ve played and reviewed several. Yet, until now, I didn’t really link to the other games in the series, even though that has been on my mind for a while. That changed yesterday with the introduction...
Happy New Year! Hopefully 2024 will bring the needed peace and solace to everyone. 2023 was a very difficult year for us, with lots of what you might call “low lows” and a few “high highs”. We usually make fun of that saying, but this seems like the first time it’s appropriate to use it. As far as blogging goes, 2023 was a great year. See the...
Here’s my 2023 In Books end-of-year list, published on the cusp of the end of something old and the beginning of something new. Despite having much less time to sit down and read this year because of birth of our daughter, I still managed to finish 22 books in 2023. That’s 2 books more than the previous year! Granted, some of them I eventually...
My email pen pal Jw over at https://so1o.xyz/ asked me how I record screenshots for my vintage gaming reviews that get published on Jefklak’s Codex. That’s a good question that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with myself, depending on the system. I’ve already briefly touched on the topic in a couple of previous posts, but considering Jw’s...
Justin Searls over at Test Double gave a talk at RailsConf 2019 that really struck a chord here. I already briefly mentioned the talk at the beginning of December but I feel that it’s worth repeating here. Justin’s summary perfectly sets the scene: This presentation is an exploration of the things programmers can learn by building an application...
I gave up after yesterday’s quirky A* assignment. Advent of Code is an Advent calendar for programmers containing daily puzzle challenges in two parts. It was fun while it lasted, but my tight time constraints just can’t deal with the increasing challenge as the calendar draws near Christmas Eve. I get stressed out if I miss a daily challenge:...
It’s that time of the year—the time to publish the yearly notes summarizing playtime statistics and providing a personal opinion on recent and vintage Game Of The Year (GOTY) contestants. In 2022, TOEM and Shredder’s Revenge were examples of superb recent games, while Axiom Verge and Looney Tunes Collector scored high in the vintage list. If...
Yesterday, the video game DOOM turned thirty. On 10 December 1993, John Carmack, John Romero, Sandy Petersen, and the rest of the id Software crew completely changed the world by releasing the most violent and satisfying DOS shooter ever created. Hundreds of so-called “DOOM clones” followed, frantically trying to join in on the cash grabbing fun....
December marks the beginning of the countdown to Christmas, traditionally via Advent calendars. For us programmer nerds, a special one exists called Advent of Code where each December day before Christmas we’re treated with a challenging programming puzzle. This year a good friend convinced me to join in on the fun and so far I have been really...
After Inktober and November’s National Novel Writing Month, this time it’s DOSember, a month long of DOS game streaming on the Twitch community! Screw the classic holiday fanfare, let’s have a wonderful DOSember instead. I haven’t participated in the DOS Game Club’s monthly sessions lately, but this month we’re tackling Lemmings, so I might go...
As I once again find myself staring at local software dev job ads, I can’t help but wonder: what are the current trends in local software dev ads? In other words, can we identify patterns by data mining job ads? The answer is, of course, yes, but the results are disappointingly comparable with the last time I was flipping through ads, in...
Almost every few weeks, a new and exciting retro hardware project is announced. These are truly great times for retro computing enthusiasts. How come these hobby projects explore in popularity lately, besides the obvious growth in demand and the availability of crowdfunding platforms such as Kickstarter that at least partially remove the stress...
The articles here at Brain Baking end with a footer that contains the author bio and ways to contact me, including my preferred channel, email. Instead of including a simple link, however, the email link, when clicked on, is being replaced by the actual email address with the help of a small JavaScript function. Why? The question shouldn’t be...
Four Podcasts is my upper limit—that’s the remark of a friend while discussing the overabundance of podcasts in the last few years. I was curious how friends managed to listen to so many of them. I’m a Patreon supporter of Retronauts that puts out lengthy new episodes weekly, and even that is sometimes hard to keep up with. What I Listen To blog...
Everyone’s doing these app defaults lists lately. Since they’re lists and I happen to like lists, I guess I’ll chime in, even though I don’t think these blog posts add much value for others. Instead, they could be interesting to look back to for myself in a far future? Here goes. Backup system: Restic synced to the NAS with my own system-tray...
Something scary dawned to me recently after having peeked into several source code repositories of funded projects here in academia. Most of these repositories contain code that would instantly make my software engineering ex-colleagues sick—and by sick, I mean suddenly-needing-a-bucket sick. What gives? In academia, we write throwaway code....
I’ve had an interesting conversation with Mr Creosote on Mastodon a few months ago that lingered in the cavernous debts of my subconsciousness until another related thought dragged it back up. Mr Creosote is the founder of The Good Old Days, a befriended retro game review website that—and this is the beginning of the problem—gets almost no views....
It’s spooky season! Wait, no, again. Spooky season is over! Or are we still in it? For just this week you say? I never really understood the Halloween craze and dismissed it as yet another Americanized craze that made its way to Europe, but after participating in a ghost hunt for children, I revised my opinion: it can be a lot of fun, both for...
For decades, I’ve been trained to optimize my thinking in terms of numbers. I’ve been pushed to be more productive, and enjoyed being more productive, which in turn led to searchers on how to be even more productive. I’ve accomplished things and felt good about it, motivating myself to accomplish more things. But I’ve always been quite bad at...
After compiling my top 25 best games of all time list, I started drafting a list of my 25 best albums of all time, which after several revisions, I still have conflicted feelings about. It somehow was much harder for me to come up with 25 musical entries compared to the video game one, in part because I’m not a big music nut and in part because I...
A recurring trend among bloggers is meta-blogging: blogging about blogging. My pristine AI model—namely, my own brain—spotted another variation of this pattern in the RSS feed reader this month, and since I like all things meta except for a certain company called Meta, I want in on it. Here’s a short summary of statements I very much align with....
After a lengthy regulatory review, Microsoft now officially closes its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Seventy billion, the largest transfer sum to date in the video gaming industry. The EU was worried this might cause harm to the industry as Microsoft comfortably wiggles itself in an even bigger monopoly position, but after...
That’s a good question! CS1 courses, or Computer Science 1, are typically the first computing courses in higher education where students are exposed to a programming language. They traditionally teach concepts such as variables and scoping, control blocks, code flow, and some, like in our own faculty, even immediately introduce object-oriented...
My general conclusion after a day of digging through and studying a semi-random pile of academic papers on the subject of creative confidence is that authors put in disturbingly little effort to effectively make their results and created tools accessible to the general public. I even wonder why some high profile papers published in acclaimed...
Edge Magazine put out another ranking, this time the 100 greatest video games of the past 30 years, which yet again fueled my obsession with lists. The list is—of course—depressingly inaccurate, with giant holes in it such as Diablo II or Final Fantasy VI. And then someone at Mastodon shared his “top 25 GOAT” video game list, created with...
Our first-year engineering students have been exposed to higher education for a good two weeks now, and as is typical for each “virgin” semester, casualties are slowly but surely starting to appear. This year, however, as a teacher, something irritated me more than usual: the quickness of giving up. Focus has been a worsening problem for decades...