Alex Harrison

yes, but it's from your 20s until you die

vc funding but it's just a dude with a job giving my unemployed ass 100 bucks

Anytime anyone in the future mentions git even in passing I am going to evangelize about git reflog. This has saved my ass so many times since I learned about it.

Hated making icons by code in my app, so I wrote a whole ass separate panel for making them lmao.

Only took a few hours to make, surprisingly time efficient!

figured out that literally any api can be immediate mode with good caches behind it
this has caused many small revelations for me

Rationalism is a cult but damn do they have the most accurate and actionable advice sometimes

Goddamn it, why is modding tooling always exclusive to windows. We had cross-platform development in the 80s!

I am now officially a dolphin developer yippee! My two line change has been merged.

IMO it's totally valid (and in some cases better) to use a big flat string as the backing for a text editor. You can easily memmove for inserts in under a millisecond on multi-megabyte text files.

And while people may open and look through larger files (e.g. logs) it's unlikely they will edit them.

Just finished rewriting two ubiquitous ssbm tools in like a week to be faster, simpler, easier to use, more correct, and cross platform. I love my job.

big fan of stonemasonry

god I'm so freaking tired right now!!

It's so fun learning a field that's adjacent to your main expertise. You constantly think "yep, I'm gonna look back at this and cringe". But this feeling isn't negative for me, it's instead looking forward to the enjoyment of drastic improvement over the next few months.

I really like bsky because there's no one here. I don't want people seeing my lowest behaviour of shouting into the void.

Yeah go for it! But I think you should make it in pure html and css first before you get lost in the frontend jungle.

Never thought I'd be saying this but damn, webdev is kinda fun.

At least if you don't do anything crazy. Got a simple server read/writing to a db and from a site working in a few hours. Gonna turn it into a simple forum / chat for fun.

Used sqlite, mongoose, and htmx and it works great.

shoutouts to @alex-for-real.bsky.social for defeating himself in order to win empty house

I really like doing commissions for tournaments. Being self-employed means I don't have any deadlines, which makes my efforts often meandering and unfocused. Having that hard deadline is nice as it forces me to get my shit together. Reminds me of uni, except now people actually care.

Just fixed a crazy bug. The results screen model scale table was being overwritten unknowingly by mex, causing us to load code as a model scale value making models to disappear. Was hell to track down, thank god for memory breakpoints. Solution was ez tho, just moved the table and it works great!

UI upgrades took so long...

BUT I found a cool new (to me) way of representing UI! Instead of a tree, all you need are two vectors, a panel vector and a split vector.

Each split contains a direction and bitfields for the l/r or u/d panels. Then split manipulation is pretty much all bitfield ops!

Last one.

This is my wgpu wrapper. Just be aware that it's not intended for other people to use. github.com/AlexanderHar...

The function z^t

This is the base visualization. Each ring is 2^n out, and the grid lines are on the integers.

I definitely could improve the colours. They're fine for an afternoon project tho.

Here's a modular form! I don't know what they are, but they look cool!

Yes, this project was nerd-sniped by www.quantamagazine.org/behold-modul...

woah...

Wrote a complex plane visualization with my wgpu wrapper today. Was a lot of fun!

I highly recommend building a graphics programming wrapper. Making small programs like this is soooooooo much faster and simpler. This visualization only took 150 lines, including the shader!

See a few more below

Has anyone tried out the SDL3 gpu api yet? What did you think of it?

I skimmed the docs, and it looks very similar to the webgpu api. It makes sense they'd be similar - they both wrap the same graphics backends.

Working in a legacy codebase is mostly pain, but it can be fun when you get to refactor gems like this.

I'm not sure if the new logic is 100% the same, but I guarantee the original author also had no clue what their code was calculating either. In any case, it tests just fine.

It might be cool to have an expression / statement selection mode, but pulling in tree-sitter is a big commitment and I wanna see what inherent workflow issues I have with the current model before going crazy with the fun stuff.

It's super simple, just splitting on either:
- Paragraph - double newlines
- Line - newlines
- Word - whitespace
- Group - differing character types (word-like, symbolic, etc.)
- Character - any character