Too Long; Didn't Read (TL;DR) The Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) is really old, so to make games for it you need to unlearn your Object-Oriented ways and do some swapping around of values. It's not impossible to learn and there are a ton of resources and tools to make it easier. Go to download sections to download compilers and graphics tools to get going on the NES. Introduction The past half year my mind has been wandering.
This has been bugging me for a while. While working on my business logic and REST API connection in my NativeScript project, I couldn’t write tests because requiring the tns-core-modules broke the test. NativeScript is a library with tooling to create iOS and Android apps in JavaScript. And it works smoothly. However at the moment the docs aren’t always complete. Anyways, building and deploying an app on a mobile device (or emulator) takes somewhere in the range of a minute or so on a fast machine.
After looking at the program of Nodeconf 2014, I took the liberty to convince my boss that I should go there. Because of the structure and quality of the workshops. Little did I know that the conf part was going to be canceled, and the adventure had no prior scheduling. Except for what people handed in beforehand as topics they would want to speak about, or hear about. The conference “started” with the OaklandJS meetup.
This topic of course ties in with the Building Communities session. Because building community happens with code that is being used. And if you want people to be able to join easily, one of their first entry points will probably be the README, which has for some projects become the only or the main documentation. At the moment the documentation of some projects is exemplary (think: anything @substack makes). Whereas the documentation of node itself is kind of a mess.
A lot of the talks were not just about code or “hardcore” technical stuff, but also about social things like: building community, writing documentation, creating a safe environment. Which in the software meetups and talks scene has been growing as a topic. To dismay of some, and celebration of others. This session started out as a discussion about the node project, “the Fork”: io.js and what it says about the community and the culture of node.
JavaScript gets a new version, what now Languages are never done. They evolve over time and are supplemented with new words every month, new phrases every year and acquires (minor) grammar changes every decade. This true for speaking languages as well as for programming languages. The past year there has been a lot of talk about EcmaScript 6 (a.k.a. ES Harmony, or lately ES2015, which is the silliest name of all).
Containers, like the ones you put sundries in? Linux Containers (LXC) have been a hot new topic over the last 2 years. The easiest way to understand a container is to compare it with a Virtual Machine (VM). You can run a VM on your machine and it will pretend to be a computer inside a computer. It will emulate hardware so it can run an Operating System (OS) within your computer.
N.B. This one of the first sessions held at nodeconf, everybody was still somewhat rusty. Isomorphic JavaScript is the practice of using the same JavaScript code on the server and in the browser. In the session we talked about how to best implement this, and what to avoid. The naming is ridiculous, so let’s just use Universal JavaScript. One of the first recommendations were to do static analysis. This goes through your code and finds dead dependencies or function that are never called.
TL;DR the monogame community is pretty great Lately my manic ambitious mode has turned on again for me. So I have about 100s of ideas again, which sadly of course will all come to nothing. But while I’m at it, I thought I’d make the best of it to do some tutorials here and there and learn some stuff I know nothing about. Starting with Monogame on Linux is kind of a hassle to start with, but if you push through it works.
The Mad Science Act, was something completely different. It featured many topics and some of the most creative and prolific npmjs.org authors. It was a bit mad, so I’ll try to make it as coherent as I understood it. I have split up the post in 2 parts. It would be too much put into one. Professor Substack – Mad Science intro. When you start out creating (npm) modules you realize there is a great shortage of modules.