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This is in no way going to be a comprehensive guide on how to get started with open source; its going to be more of a description of my journey.
This might help you if you’re a beginner struggling to make your way into open source...
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I’m not a big fan of job titles. I’ve always had trouble defining what I do as a noun—I much prefer verbs (“I make websites” sounds fine, but “website maker” sounds kind of weird).
Mind you, the real issue is not finding the right words to describe what I do, but rather figuring out just what the heck it is that I actually do in the first place…
As you may know, I’ve lately found an excuse to play with some new web technologies, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to try to gain a deeper understanding of some less bleeding-edge technologies that I think have some interesting potential. And so it was that, while I was staffing the Three Rings stall at last week’s NCVO conference, I made use of the time that the conference delegates were all off listening to a presentation to throw together a tech demo I call Steer!
As you can see from the GIF above, Steer! is a driving game. The track and your car are displayed in a web browser on a large screen, for example a desktop or laptop computer, television, or tablet, and your mobile phone is used to steer the car by tilting it to swerve around a gradually-narrowing weaving road. It’s pretty fun, but what really makes it interesting to me is the combination of moderately-new technologies I’ve woven together to make it possible, specifically:
The desktop browser does all of the real work: it takes the orientation of the device and uses that, and the car’s current speed, to determine how it’s position changes over the time
that’s elapsed since the screen was last refreshed: we’re aiming for 60 frames a second, of course, but we don’t want the car to travel slower when the game is played on a
slower computer, so we use requestAnimationFrame to get the fastest rate possible and calculate the time between renderings to work out how much of a change has
occurred this ‘tick’. We leave the car’s sprite close to the bottom of the screen at all times but change how much it rotates from side to side, and we use it’s rotated to decide how
much of its motion is lateral versus the amount that’s “along the track”. The latter value determines how much track we move down the screen “behind” it.
The track is generated very simply by the addition of three sine waves of different offset and frequency – a form of very basic procedural generation. Despite the predictability of mathematical curves, this results in a moderately organic-feeling road because the player only sees a fraction of the resulting curve at any given time: the illustration below shows how these three curves combine to make the resulting road. The difficulty is ramped up the further the player has travelled by increasing the amplitude of the resulting wave (i.e. making the curves gradually more-agressive) and by making the road itself gradually narrower. The same mathematics are used to determine whether the car is mostly on the tarmac or mostly on the grass and adjust its maximum speed accordingly.
In order to help provide a visual sense of the player’s speed, I added dashed lines down the road (dividing it into three lanes to begin with and two later on) which zip past the car and provide a sense of acceleration, deceleration, overall speed, and the impact of turning ‘sideways’ (which of course reduces the forward momentum to nothing).
This isn’t meant to be a finished game: it’s an experimental prototype to help explore some technologies that I’d not had time to look seriously at before now. However, you’re welcome to take a copy – it’s all open source – and adapt or expand it. Particular ways in which it’d be fun to improve it might include:
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Chrome comes with built-in developer tools. This comes with a wide variety of features, such as Elements, Network, and Security. Today, we’ll focus 100% on its JavaScript console.
When I started coding, I only used the JavaScript console for logging values like responses from the server, or the value of variables. But over time, and with the help of tutorials, I discovered that the console can do way more than I ever imagined…
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I realized something today:
Ruby is still great.
I’ve spent the last couple of weeks digging into some of the newer/fancier/shinier technologies that have been in the limelight of the development world lately – specifically Elixir, Phoenix and Elm – and while I’ve thoroughly enjoyed them all (and instantly had a bunch of fun ideas for things to build with them), I also realized once more how much I like Ruby, and what kind of project it’s still a great choice for…
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Most people’s journey toward learning to program starts with a single late-night Google search.
Usually it’s something like “Learn ______”
But how do they decide which language to search for?…
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If you want to attract and keep developers, don’t emphasize ping-pong tables, lounges, fire pits and chocolate fountains. Give them private offices or let them work from home, because uninterrupted time to concentrate is the most important and scarcest commodity…
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I remember the first time I saw a codebase over a million lines. It was at my internship, a large 10+ year old system, in multiple languages, thousands of unit tests, organized into several projects and dll’s that would take the whole night to recompile. Some of the projects had complex build processes, requiring extensive scripts, and even our source control had custom hooks preventing us from committing code that didn’t follow our style guides. It looked like it would take me a week just to read through all the documentation. My lead programmer told me it usually took people a year to understand the project in depth, but my internship was only for 3 months.
Wow, I thought. Is this what it takes to be a real programmer?
…
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I am the original author of GNU grep. I am also a FreeBSD user, although I live on -stable (and older) and rarely pay attention to -current. However, while searching the -current mailing list for an unrelated reason, I stumbled across some flamage regarding BSD grep vs GNU grep performance. You may have noticed that discussion too...
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Sometimes I feel developers think that performance is a dark art. It is not. In my experience, well performing systems come down to this: fewer and faster. If you are doing something a lot, do it fewer times. If you are doing something that is slow, make it faster. It really is that simple. The more things you make your system do and the slower those things are, the worse your performance will be…
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“Your team is only as good as your weakest reviewer.”
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I am increasingly of the opinion that the general software engineering adage “Don’t Repeat Yourself” does not always apply to web development. Also, I found that web development classes in CS academia are not very realistic. These two problems turn out to have the same root cause: a lack of appreciation of what browsers do…
An annual tradition at Three Rings is DevCamp, an event that borrows from the “hackathon” concept and expands it to a week-long code-producing factory for the volunteers of the Three Rings development team. Motivating volunteers is a very different game to motivating paid employees: you can’t offer to pay them more for working harder nor threaten to stop paying them if they don’t work hard enough, so it’s necessary to tap in to whatever it is that drives them to be a volunteer, and help them get more of that out of their volunteering.
At least part of what appeals to all of our developers is a sense of achievement – of producing something that has practical value – as well as of learning new things, applying what they’ve learned, and having a degree of control over the parts of the project they contribute most-directly to. Incidentally, these are the same things that motivate paid developers, too, if a Google search for studies on the subject is to believed. It’s just that employers are rarely able to willing to offer all of those things (and even if they can, you can’t use them to pay your mortgage), so they have to put money on the table too. With my team at Three Rings, I don’t have money to give them, so I have to make up for it with a surplus of those things that developers actually want.
It seems strange to me in hindsight that for the last seven years I’ve spent a week of my year taking leave from my day job in order to work longer, harder, and unpaid for a voluntary project… but that I haven’t yet blogged about it. Over the same timescale I’ve spent about twice as long at DevCamp than I have, for example, skiing, yet I’ve managed to knock out several blog posts on that subject. Part of that might be borne out of the secretive nature of Three Rings, especially in its early days (when involvement with Three Rings pretty-much fingered you as being a Nightline volunteer, which was frowned upon), but nowadays we’ve got a couple of dozen volunteers with backgrounds in a variety of organisations: and many of those of us that ever were Nightliner volunteers have long since graduated and moved-on to other volunteering work besides.
Part of the motivation – one of the perks of being a Three Rings developer – for me at least, is DevCamp itself. Because it’s an opportunity to drop all of my “day job” stuff for a week, go to some beatiful far-flung corner of the country, and (between early-morning geocaching/hiking expeditions and late night drinking tomfoolery) get to spend long days contributing to something awesome. And hanging out with like-minded people while I do so. I like I good hackathon of any variety, but I love me some Three Rings DevCamp!
So yeah: DevCamp is awesome. It’s more than a little different than those days back in 2003 when I wrote all the code and Kit worked hard at distracting me with facts about the laws of Hawaii – for the majority of DevCamp 2016 we had half a dozen developers plus two documentation writers in attendance! – but it’s still fundamentally about the same thing: producing a piece of software that helps about 25,000 volunteers do amazing things and make the world a better place. We’ve collectively given tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of hours of time in developing and supporting it, but that in turn has helped to streamline the organisation of about 16 million person-hours of other volunteering.
So that’s nice.
Oh, and I was delighted that one of my contributions this DevCamp was that I’ve finally gotten around to expanding the functionality of the “gender” property so that there are now more than three options. That’s almost more-exciting than the geocaches. Almost.
Edit: added a missing word in the sentence about how much time our volunteers had given, making it both more-believable and more-impressive.
There’s a wonderful tool for making web-based “choose your own adventure”-type games, called Twine. One of the best things about it is that it’s so accessible: if you wanted to, you could be underway writing your first ever story with it in about 5 minutes from now, without installing anything at all, and when it was done you could publish it on the web and it would just work.
But the problem with Twine is that, in its latest and best versions, you’re trapped into using the Twine IDE. The Twine IDE is an easy-to-use, highly visual, ‘drag-and-drop’ interface for making interactive stories. Which is probably great if you’re into IDEs or if you don’t “know better”… but for those of us who prefer to do our writing in a nice clean, empty text editor like Sublime or TextMate or to script/automate our builds, it’s just frustrating to lose access to the tools we love. Plus, highly-visual IDEs make it notoriously hard to collaborate with other authors on the same work without simply passing it back and forwards between you: unless they’ve been built with this goal in mind, you generally can’t have two people working in the same file at the same time.
Earlier versions of Twine had a command-line tool called Twee that perfectly filled this gap. But the shiny new versions don’t. That’s where I came in.
In that way that people who know me are probably used to by now, I was very-slightly unsatisfied with one aspect of an otherwise fantastic product and decided that the correct course of action was to reimplement it myself. So that’s how, a few weeks ago, I came to release Twee2.
If you’re interested in writing your own “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type interactive fiction, whether for the world or just for friends, but you find user-friendly IDEs like Twine limiting (or you just prefer a good old-fashioned text editor), then give Twee2 a go. I’ve written a simple 2-minute tutorial to get you started, it works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, and just-about everything else, and it’s completely open-source if you’d like to expand or change it yourself.
(there are further discussions about the concept and my tool on Reddit here, here, here and here, and on the Twinery forums here, here and here)
