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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I can’t tell if you’re trolling. But if you aren’t, here’s something cool you might enjoy.

    If an object has two sides, you can colour each side a different colour. Think of a dinner plate. That has two sides and an edge that goes all the way around. You could use a marker to colour the front side red, stopping anywhere you hit an edge. Then you could use another marker to colour the back side blue, because the backside wouldn’t be coloured yet.

    It sounds like I’m explaining this in a dumb, very obvious way. I am. Not because I think anyone reading this is dumb. But because the shape in the photo does something that is not obvious.

    Look at the shape above and imagine it without all the keys sticking out. Imagine it is smooth enough to draw on with a marker. It’s pretty easy to see where any edges are. Imagine colouring one side of the shape red, avoiding where the edge is. If you keep colouring as much as you can, without crossing an edge, once you’re done you’ll find that there’s no place left to colour with the blue marker. You’ll have coloured the whole shape. It only has one side and that one side snakes and twists around to be its own backside as well.

    If you’re looking to learn more, the shape is called a Möbius strip.


  • I found a technique that worked well for me. I want to share with you and others, but I don’t want to come across as judging you in anyway. It’s hard to find great candidates of any sort. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend my technique to every company, because it’s just not reasonable in all cases.

    I’ve found that the best way to get a good mix of people hired onto the team is to do more than hope that it happens.

    I had to get out to workshops, conferences, and meetups. Local universities had groups that I got in touch with. I had to make connections with the communities that I was looking to hire from. It was a lot of hard work.

    But once you’ve developed those connections, candidates roll in with surprising regularity for a long time. After two years I had a team of 10 great devs with a 50/50 split between genders and a huge range of background and cultures. It was the most fun team to work with and we made awesome stuff.








  • I’ve been thinking about the disappearance of God games. I think they didn’t disappear, but they evolved so much that we don’t recognize them anymore.

    I feel some moved into the direction that we now call “simulators”, like RimWorld, the Sims, Two Point Hospital, and more. In my mind, the big difference between the God games of old and those new games is that in the older games your role as the player was explicitly defined, where in the new games it’s not. In the old games, you were “playing the role of a god in that realm”. The new games don’t bother to tell you “who” you are in this setting. You’re just the player, get on with it, play the game.

    I feel like other God games moved in the direction of top down colony builders, like Against the Storm or Frostpunk. And again, I think the big difference between those games and something like Populous is that your role as the player doesn’t have an explicit name in the game world. You’re not a “God”. But most of the rest of the trappings are there, I think.

    What do you think?