Elmore: The Finest One of All

I’ve never been too fond of D&D, and especially not the 2nd edition, but a single illustration stuck me when I first saw it, in the Player’s Handbook that I borrowed from a classmate back in high school. It’s been more than 30 years now, and I still find this piece incredibly evocative. Well, obviously I’m not the only one, since this colorful YouTuber has managed to make a 30-minute video on it, and keep it interesting, too!

The little-told story about the BART seat-slashing gang […]

I loved this story of unscrupulous people gaming a system they’re part of. I might reuse it in a Cyberpunk RED scenario, or cite it as an example of wrong incentives when giving management advice. Or both.

Why I’m in the Tailwind cult

I’m still trying to understand the appeal of Tailwind. Unfortunately, this article didn’t convince me; it only reinforced my conviction that there are many web developers won’t don’t really care for the technical foundations, limitations and superpowers of the Web, and would prefer it to be more like a desktop environment. Which was already the case back in the days of ASP.NET 1.0. I’m not one of those people, but I still wonder if I’m missing out on something. I guess I have no choice but to try it out myself…

Writing Object Shape friendly code in Ruby

This is very interesting. At the same time, it is so counter-intuitive that I don’t ever see myself using it. And yet, I find it really cool, and I’m glad that this kind of optimization exists, as costly as it may be, for the people who need it.

That useless Ruby syntax sugar that emerged in new versions

I am definitely in the camp of the back-pushing people who don’t like, or at best don’t care for, the newest additions to Ruby – things like the numbers block parameters or the pattern matching. This is why I appreciate this series of articles, which could challenge my scepticism. (Like with the Tailwind article above, so far it hasn’t really worked, but that’s not important.)