Ventures of an ex indie game developer

Usability and expressiveness

Apple proved the importance of responsive animation with iOS in 2007, but I'm still surprised from time to other when I try UI out. Take these jelly info boxes for instance.

See the Pen Expanding info boxes with jelly by Jonas Byström (@highfestiva) on CodePen.


There's no doubting which box you clicked as they expand. No game dev lately however. Composed a Python fuzzy file finder by accident tho.

Also made a surveillance tool for my dayjob during night (gasp! He's being altruistic about his time, giving it away to the needing... billion dollar company H&M). It's amazing what you can do with a standard installation of python. Listen to this. I wrote a background "status crawl" of sorts (ten parallel processes), read an .ini file, setup a web server, made some html templating support, parsed some hard-to-find files on disk and then some in 344 lines. What other language can do that with a standard installation without any extra libraries? I doubt there is one, and I'm still, after years of developing in Python, mightily impressed by the sheer awesomeness of Python's standard lib and its compact syntax.

Neither JS nor Python is the future, they are merely simple tools for simple jobs. Either the quantum leap in programming will come in the next few years, or we've reached event horizon for us as a species. The fact that programming theory is pretty much on the same level now as forty years ago doesn't bode well. But at least we can take the best of what we have today and compose into compact, modular and standardized languages. Even though it's far from what I feel can be accomplished, it's better than today's state of affairs.

BTW: Have you ever run IBM WebSphere Application Server? It is to Java developers what SAP is to IT staff in general: a gigantic pile of unpolished turds that the personnel have been appointed to eat. As a Java developer there's not much else to do; the problem, I feel, is that everybody's happily munching away.

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Gothenburg, Sweden