A Haiku About Debugging and the Perception of Productivity
07 February 2025
Often a small fix
Requires thorough debugging
Its trace left unseen
Gamedev, graphics, open source. Shuffling bytes and swizzling vectors since 2004...
07 February 2025
Often a small fix
Requires thorough debugging
Its trace left unseen
06 May 2024
I stopped going on Twitter a while ago because it has the tendency to evoke rage, as it is designed to do. But every now and then I check back in - it can be useful sometimes for keeping up with graphics research, gamedev news and some people do post nice things, like sharing projects they are working on, so there is something to pull me back from time to time.
29 April 2023
Work has been continuing smoothly on my Rust graphics engine project hotline over the last month or so. I was slowly winding down from my current day job and have a little time off before starting a new role, so that has given me more time to dedicate to this project. I have been focusing on implementing different graphics demos and rendering techniques, which has thrown up a few missing pieces in the gfx backend and I am keen to get the API as complete as possible, because I am unsure of how much time I will have to work on it when I start my new role or even the validity of working on code in the public domain.
03 March 2023
Following on from the part 2 post a little while ago, I have been continuing work on my graphics engine hotline in Rust. My recent focus has been on plugins, multi-threaded command buffer generation and hot reloading for Rust code, hlsl shader code and pmfx render configs. I have made decent progress to the point where there is something quite usable and structured in a way I am relatively happy with. This leg of the journey has been by far the most challenging though, so I wanted to write about my current progress and detail some of the issues I have faced.
27 August 2022
I have just finished up a linear algebra maths library in Rust and it’s available on crates.io. It contains the usual implementation of vectors, matrices and quaternions but also tons of useful intersection, distance functions, point tests, graphs, utility functions and ergonomic decisions to hopefully make this fun and nimble to use for gamedev and graphics coding. I have been spending small chunks of time writing functions and tests over the summer, it has been quite enjoyable and I have learned a lot more about the Rust programming language, especially going into more detail with traits and trait bounds than I have previously, and also my first real work with macros.
10 May 2022
I have just been going through the process of migrating all of my continuous integration (CI) to use GitHub Actions. The reason for migrating is because one of my previous CI providers, Travis, stopped being free for open source repositories, they gave some free “credits” but they have now been consumed. The pricing plan and website is also now confusing for Travis; they have OSS (Open Source) credits and private credits which were consumed from my OSS projects! The pricing starts at $69 a month, which is a bit steep for me, especially considering there are other free alternatives. So I decided to move entirely to GitHub Actions and the process has really been straightforward and has given me a chance to improve my CI setup.