Weekend report.

[prog]

It has been a full weekend.

Saturday saw a lot of Volity hacking, breaking ground on the web client's server-side component. Once the complete skeleton is built I'll commit it as v0.1, but my fugue state didn't last more than a few hours and I had to be all "whoah" and raise my hands and step away before I could quite get there. Maybe I'll finish it today. Anyway, this will be the first Perl-based Volity sub-project that I've started since I got religion via Perl Best Practices, which taught me to start major projects by writing the tests (and, in so doing, designing the interface) first. So that's exciting. If you're me.

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In the evening, radiotelescope, cthulhia and I saw Day Watch, the sequel to last year's Night Watch, a.k.a. the crazy Russian vampire movie that everyone except for me and the people I saw it with hated. I liked this movie too, though not as much as the first. It replaced the crazy imagery and action of the first movie with some fun plot development. I dug it, but I missed the other stuff. It also contained one completely irritating character, who (among other things) failed Mo's Movie Measure the instant that she was able. Worse was that this occurred during an egregious and overlong "Freaky Friday" sequence, and so I spent five or six minutes in a sustained wince in the middle of this otherwise enjoyable flick, and that was unfortunate.

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Sunday was classicaljunkie's birthday! Following plans that dougo initiated a while ago, and also accompanied by Cthulhia, we drove to Kimball Farms to play miniature golf, or "putt-putt" as CJ calls it in her native language. I hadn't played since I was a kid but I'll be damned if I still didn't have reasonably good chops for it. My friends laughed when I said it was all the golfing video games I play, but I wasn't entirely joking! The place has two courses, and we played both, with me winning the first round and CJ the second (after Cth left), though the point spread was fairly tight.

The courses were enjoyable but rather bland, with one real standout whose like I had never seen before: one hole split in a vee a few feet away from the tee, with one arm snaking towards the cup in the usual fashion, and the other dumping into an artificial stream. As it turns out, the best solution involves purposefully putting into the water, which carries your ball under a platform and through a hidden tube, ejecting it right at the cup. But there's no explicit documentation about this; you either need to watch someone do it, or be intrepid enough to figure that there had to be some reason for the hole's stairway-to-nowhere design, making the leap of faith yourself. Doug was the brave one in our party, and he and I both got holes in one.

The rest of the course was really nothing special, but I just couldn't shut up about that one hole. Great design!

Also did some unexpected networking: the dad of the family playing behind us turned out to be a publisher of some computer and video game magazines from the 1980s and 90s that I loved as a kid! He couldn't help but overhear Doug and I talk about Volity and iPhones and such, and we chatted for a while. he was interested to hear about my startup, so I need to email him a little follow-up today. Had no business cards on hand, but wrote my info on the back of an extra scorecard for him.

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Then we went to dinner with dictator555, at Pigalle, in the Boylston vicinity. This was the first time I'd really experienced a fancy-dan restaurant where you pay exorbitantly for very little edible mass. It felt like something from a New Yorker cartoon. I ordered a $15 a menu item describing itself as gnocchi, and it meant this quite literally, featuring a gnocchi, one single piece, on a little bed of vegetables; an island in an otherwise large and empty plate. I did appreciate this, though perhaps not in the way they meant me to.

It was delicious, what there was, and I also quite enjoyed the sampling that my dining companions allowed me from their dishes. I said that I'd consider returning the next time I felt the need to really impress someone.

Comments

[dougo.livejournal.com]

http://www.leepappas.com/

[prog.livejournal.com]

Yep.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

I have an intense craving for mini golf now; thank you for bringing it to mind! Truly amazing that there isn't a spectacular mini golf game for Wii yet.

re best practices and writing tests first: I bought a book on Test Driven Development on a whim and I totally love the idea. It's certainly the best way I've seen to develop discrete modules, cause it forces you to be a user of your own system. I wish I could apply the test-first approach to all my day-to-day stuff but there's a certain... culture in game development that makes it difficult. I will persevere... :)

[prog.livejournal.com]

It's not just game development; it's any shop where there's a "We have no time for luxuries like testing! Rush rush rush to market or we lose!!" mentality, which is sadly a rather pervasive one.

The argument that that PBP made which sold me was: You write dopey little scripts to make sure that your new software works anyway, right? OK, so just learn to do that first, pretending that you've already written the software that the scripts invoke. Add a bit of language/culture-appropiate testing idioms, and there's your initial test suite. As a bonus, you've also designed your initial interface, since you forced yourself to think in terms of how you expect the software to work!

[prog.livejournal.com]

Also, I'd totally lay down a Grant right now for a mini-golf Wii game. There's so much that could be done with this concept!

[dougo.livejournal.com]

My problem is that most stuff I write can't really be tested without a huge amount of infrastructrue-- even just writing stubs for everything would take more effort than just writing the code, and if anything in the design changes, you have to change a ton of stubs. It's still probably worth it in the long run, but it's a lot of front-loaded pain.

[chocorisu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, a lot of the code I seem to write these days is "glue"--stuff that assumes whatever I'm calling (usually written by someone else) already works. Writing tests first would involve writing unit tests for everyone else's code... which would be lovely but I am but one mere mortal. :)

[prog.livejournal.com]

Belated followup (since I missed this in email somehow): Yes, I can agree with this too. I don't write tests for everything I do for my freelance client, for example. But if I am laying out a whole, self-contained project, I now put the time into testing that I never used to.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

BTW, Mojo has a mini golf game you can unlock by finishing the main game. Not that I expect you will just for that reason, but there you go. :-)

[prog.livejournal.com]

I think I gave away my Mojo to some PS2-newbie friend a long time ago. :)

Anyway (and it almost goes without saying), that's so not the same thing. A Wii minigolf game would by definition rock all over any push-button/click-mouse minigolf game, unless it was programmed by drunken chimps (as 27 percent of all video games are, so).