This Killscreen article, The people trying to save programming , which I found via lobste.rs really caught my attention. The article is about some people that are trying to fix the way games are made, they think that software is development is too impersonal and long for the good old days of the Apple 2. Commercial Game engines are the problem.

The article is worth a read. Digging into the community around handmade hero is interesting too, but I don't really think either of the developers mentioned are starting a movement. To me it feels like the appeal to the desire everyone has to understand everything, actioning that by inventing the universe.

That is fine and all, but far too many new people get stuck in the trap of trying to build a world before they can walk(I did). The best tools for a beginner are the ones that let them succeed as quickly as possible. The hard nitty gritty details can be learnt later on.

Reading: Cibola Burn

Again it is cold, the previous few years there really hasn't been any substantial 'winter'. This year is different.

I did some work on the wireless driver yesterday, but it was entirely refactoring. I do think I am in a point to start crashing things. I am very happy with this sort of progress, even if it isn't really interesting. The small steps are required for the big steps to work.

Reading: Cibola Burn

It is cold and I am hiding inside, today clearly things yesterday was far too warm. Morning temperature was -5, which is nothing compared to the arctic, but cold for somewhere people live. If I set up temperature sensors I could make some plots, but that seems like a lot of hassle.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Cibola Burn

This article on the use of bots on github made me think of a different use of the github api .

The first pieces of python code I pushed to github on my own account were in my tiny-artnet mircopython artnet implementation. Soon after committing that code I started getting emails from recruiters looking to hire python developers. They would say something along the lines 'based on your github activity we think you would be perfect for a job doing django".

At first these were hilarious, micropython is nothing like python, if they had looked at my github profile they would have seen the large C projects I work on.

But after a few of these I started to get annoyed, clearly these people were finding my email from code I had written or from commit logs. Why weren't they trying a little bit harder? To me, github is the technical recruiters wet dream, but whoever was generating the leads here clearly wasn't doing a good job.

I don't think cold lead generation is a good way to sell anything, let alone a job opportunity, but this is how I would use github(bitbucket, gitlab and everything else too) to do it.

1. Search projects that have the correct language keywords (python, go, c)
2. Find any email addresses at all, sort by most recent
3. Attempt to resolve email addresses into real people
4. a) Find personal site for email address or b) (worse) find social media pages for address
5. Send generated lead info to recruiter

The human at the end needs to be able to do a final set of filters, but anywhere that is too high a cost isn't going to use the lead well anyway. I am sure the 100 line script that could be written on those lines that would generate substantially better leads than cold contacting any email address.

Reading: Reamde

Winter is here, stepping out this morning it was -2, hopefully the start of some nice seasonal weather with a showering of snow and not the minimum temperature for the year.

The twitters tell me that Bunnie Huang of Hacking the Xbox , Breaking SD Cards , The Essential Guide to Electronics in Shenzhen and a ton of other cool things has a new book in the works . I read Hacking the Xbox when it was released for Free after Aaron Swartz's death, the book is an excellent read and gave me a ton of insights about electronics and breaking physical things. The new book is in early access, which means you can read it if you think reading tiny bits of a book is a good idea.

While on the nostarch I looked at another early access book, Attaching Network Protocols . The cover, looking a Tardigrade at a glance(it isn't), drew me in, the awesome title didn't hurt.

Hopefully the internet will come alive and tell me when these two books are finished and available.

Reading: Reamde

Of course that snowy picture was taken up a mountain, but it was only about 4 degrees up there. Warmer than it seems it is going to get to today.