#engineering design software

[scipunk]

The Matrix: Resurrections (2021)

[bmpmp3]

avanna (:

[doom-nerdo-666]

Something underrated in FPS games is cameras.

Like Duke 3D had cameras where you could even switch the cameras to see different places.

D64 had cameras to look at specific angles and they were limited, used a few times.

D3 being modern makes it so cameras relate to screens in the environment and you see stuff happen in real time: Therefore, the cameras "exist more" in the game world

Something interesting about cameras in a genre where the player is also a camera.

[alycesutherland]

First Steps:

So I want to learn how to get access to the spotify api and my data first in my terminal. So I want to:

Get my top albums in terminal

Get my top artists in terminal

Get my top songs in terminal

If I figure it out really quick:

Add that json data into an xbar project on my Macbook

If that is easy then I'll add more stuff for when you click on xbar

[praxis-app]

Since our last release, we've introduced several significant updates, with one of the key enhancements being proposals to change group settings. This enables group members to collectively shape the group's overall functionality and tailor it to better suit their needs and preferences as the group evolves over time.

In addition to the ability to propose changes, we've introduced the following group settings:

Decision Making Model - You can now choose from consensus or consent decision-making to determine how decisions are made in the group

Admin Model - Choose from No Admin or Standard to determine how the group is managed. No Admin ensures all changes are made through proposals, while Standard allows for customizable admin roles

Ratification Threshold - Set the minimum amount of positive votes required for a proposal to be ratified under consensus

Voting Time Limit - Set a time limit for how long proposals can be voted on before they're closed or ratified. This can be set with a dropdown or a date picker

Stand Asides and Reservations Limit - Set the acceptable number of stand asides or reservations for a proposal to pass

These updates aim to offer greater customization for groups, while also showcasing how software can empower communities to collectively shape the digital spaces they occupy.

For anyone interested in helping to test the new features, feel free to hit us up on here or Discord.

Join the Praxis Discord - Mastodon - GitHub

[soapdispensersalesman]

I have no interest of going to university ever again, however there's this MA/PhD programme in Sound Design in Berlin I'd be tempted to attend sometimes, I went to the rundgang in 2022 and liked it!

Alternatively I would consider computer science so I could pursue software engineering as a day job but ngl that's more of a backup plan I'd rather just have to pay the bills and am not actually interested in pursuing beyond having the possibility to work in most countries

[mechanical-moron]

Programmers, Web designers, game developers, anyone else who does stuff with numbers on a computer screen.....curious to know if you guys ever dream in code, and if so, do you like it? I for one do not find it to be particularly enjoyable but want to hear what others have to say lol.

[cs-med-world-insights]

How to get into Coding!

Coding is very important now and in the future. Technology relies on coding and in the future you will need to know how to code to get a high-paying job. Many people consider having Computer Science field-related jobs, especially in AI. What if you are interested it in general or as a hobby? What if you don't know what you want to do yet for college?

Pick a language you want to learn: Personally, I started out with HTML and CSS. I recommend if you want to do web design HTML and CSS are good languages to start with. Otherwise, start with JavaScript or Python.

2. Find Resources: Basically you want to look at videos on YouTube, and take classes that have coding like AP CSP, AP CS A (harder class), Digital Information Technology, etc. You can also attend classes outside in the summer like CodeNinjas and use websites like code.org, freeCodeCamp, and Codecademy. Also, ask your friends for help too! You can find communities on Reddit and Discord as well.

3. Start Practicing: Practice slowly by doing small projects like making games for websites and apps. You can work with friends if you are still a beginner or need help. There's also open-source coding you can do!

4. Continue coding: If you don't continue, you will lose your skills. Be sure to always look up news on coding and different coding languages.

5. Certifications: If you are advanced in coding or want to learn more about technology, you can do certifications. This can cost a lot of money depending on what certification you are doing. Some school districts pay for your certification test. But if you take the test and pass, you can put it on your resume, and job recruiters/interviewers will be impressed! This can help with college applications and show initiative if you want a computer science degree. This shows you are a "master" of the language.

[la-principessa-nuova]

40 for the ask game

40. what’s the most interesting item you own?

hmmmmmmmm……

Ooh! Not sure if this is a good answer, but in college when I bought the cheapest used copy of the famous Go4 Design Patterns textbook I could find, I was surprised to find that it had been signed by 3 of the 4 authors!

just needs Erich Gamma to complete the set!

full list for those who want to play

[mater-development]

So I Made a Comic Panel Creator Tool

Hey everyone!

So this is a bit different from my usual posts, but I wanted to share something I've been working on that combines my love for drawing with my other life as a software engineer.

If you've been following my daily drawings, you've probably noticed I do a lot of comics and sequential art. I'm constantly scribbling in my sketchbook, doing those automatic drawings where I just let the pen flow and find images in the chaos.

I've always been inspired by the panel layout tools in Clip Studio Paint, but I wanted something more focused just on the panel creation process. Something that would let me quickly set up manga-style pages and experiment with different storytelling approaches.

So I built it myself.

What It Does

The Comic Panel Creator is basically a practice tool for comic artists (like me, like you maybe?) who want to improve their storytelling skills without getting bogged down in the technical stuff. It lets you:

Create professional comic panel layouts with proper manga dimensions (5.25 x 7.75 inch)

Generate AI-powered scripts based on your layouts (this part is wild - it actually looks at your panel arrangement and suggests story elements)

Organize your pages into complete books with covers and back covers

Export clean layouts to PDF or PNG for drawing over in whatever app you prefer

It's Open Source & Still in Development!

This project is still actively in development, so expect some rough edges and new features being added regularly. If you're into coding (or just curious), you can check out the project on GitHub: JSReact_comic-panelist (dev branch)

Why I'm Sharing This

I don't usually talk about my software engineering side on this blog, but comics are where my art and tech interests overlap perfectly. This tool has actually helped me with my own daily drawing practice, making it easier to experiment with different panel arrangements and storytelling techniques.

Back to my regular scribbles tomorrow! 🖋️

[yearofthefracturedmuses]

A Major UI/UX Glow-Up! 🎨✨

Big changes are happening in our design! After our UI designer attended a UI/UX tutorial, she came back with a ton of new insights—and it completely transformed our approach. She learned so much and wasted no time incorporating it into our design process.

I got the chance to collaborate with her, helping make key design decisions along the way. The project is evolving, and honestly, it’s exciting to watch it take shape in a way that feels more polished.

Here’s to growth, learning, and creating something even better! 🚀🎨

[alica-tech]

DevelopForGood: connecting students with non-profit opportunities 💚

Applications for Winter 2023 are now open!

If you're looking for some hands-on experience with an opportunity to gain 1:1 mentorship, and contribute to a non-profit, here's a really cool opportunity hosted by DevelopForGood.

🎉 If accepted, you'll get an offer from a non-profit to work on a remote project with your desired role

⏰ The time commitment is 16 weeks, 5-10~ hours a week, so you can treat this like a part-time internship

🎓 Current students and recent graduates are eligible to apply. Though, if you're a more experienced professional, consider applying to be a mentor!

Apply as a manager, developer, or UX/UI designer!

Choose the causes you want to work for

Would super recommend checking out this organization in general!

do I need experience to apply? We see our opportunities as learning experiences, and encourage anyone interested in tech, design, and creating social impact to apply. => read more on their FAQ page

=> https://www.developforgood.org/for-students

[codingcorgi]

Days 47-50 of coding everyday for a year... It's been stressful

So I worked on with the image on top a game in Unity. I made a reverse murder mystery visual novel for Brackeys game jam. The bottom was me getting a feel for C++ still. Tbh I'm still kind of lost with it, but I'm trying. (it's just so different from C# in some ways). I'm also doing a small coding challenge every morning after I've had my coffee with C# since that's the language I'm going to base most of my career off of (I can do Java/Kotlin, and C++ but C# is special)

Here's a link to the game...

https://dragonlens.itch.io/beyond-the-infernal-door?fbclid=IwAR0pBC6WnHavtVRscNzITDQWXwVEiNJNUkJZhXPjLG9xCGTbdrpqzxPfFXg

The next few days I'll be working on more C++, and my .Net Maui project. I also might be practicing some coding interview questions/tests since the summer is coming up soon (I did make an impressive fizzbuzz with a twist)

[watchmorecinema]

Normally I just post about movies but I'm a software engineer by trade so I've got opinions on programming too.

Apparently it's a month of code or something because my dash is filled with people trying to learn Python. And that's great, because Python is a good language with a lot of support and job opportunities. I've just got some scattered thoughts that I thought I'd write down.

Python abstracts a number of useful concepts. It makes it easier to use, but it also means that if you don't understand the concepts then things might go wrong in ways you didn't expect. Memory management and pointer logic is so damn annoying, but you need to understand them. I learned these concepts by learning C++, hopefully there's an easier way these days.

Data structures and algorithms are the bread and butter of any real work (and they're pretty much all that come up in interviews) and they're language agnostic. If you don't know how to traverse a linked list, how to use recursion, what a hash map is for, etc. then you don't really know how to program. You'll pretty much never need to implement any of them from scratch, but you should know when to use them; think of them like building blocks in a Lego set.

Learning a new language is a hell of a lot easier after your first one. Going from Python to Java is mostly just syntax differences. Even "harder" languages like C++ mostly just mean more boilerplate while doing the same things. Learning a new spoken language in is hard, but learning a new programming language is generally closer to learning some new slang or a new accent. Lists in Python are called Vectors in C++, just like how french fries are called chips in London. If you know all the underlying concepts that are common to most programming languages then it's not a huge jump to a new one, at least if you're only doing all the most common stuff. (You will get tripped up by some of the minor differences though. Popping an item off of a stack in Python returns the element, but in Java it returns nothing. You have to read it with Top first. Definitely had a program fail due to that issue).

The above is not true for new paradigms. Python, C++ and Java are all iterative languages. You move to something functional like Haskell and you need a completely different way of thinking. Javascript (not in any way related to Java) has callbacks and I still don't quite have a good handle on them. Hardware languages like VHDL are all synchronous; every line of code in a program runs at the same time! That's a new way of thinking.

Python is stereotyped as a scripting language good only for glue programming or prototypes. It's excellent at those, but I've worked at a number of (successful) startups that all were Python on the backend. Python is robust enough and fast enough to be used for basically anything at this point, except maybe for embedded programming. If you do need the fastest speed possible then you can still drop in some raw C++ for the places you need it (one place I worked at had one very important piece of code in C++ because even milliseconds mattered there, but everything else was Python). The speed differences between Python and C++ are so much smaller these days that you only need them at the scale of the really big companies. It makes sense for Google to use C++ (and they use their own version of it to boot), but any company with less than 100 engineers is probably better off with Python in almost all cases. Honestly thought the best programming language is the one you like, and the one that you're good at.

Design patterns mostly don't matter. They really were only created to make up for language failures of C++; in the original design patterns book 17 of the 23 patterns were just core features of other contemporary languages like LISP. C++ was just really popular while also being kinda bad, so they were necessary. I don't think I've ever once thought about consciously using a design pattern since even before I graduated. Object oriented design is mostly in the same place. You'll use classes because it's a useful way to structure things but multiple inheritance and polymorphism and all the other terms you've learned really don't come into play too often and when they do you use the simplest possible form of them. Code should be simple and easy to understand so make it as simple as possible. As far as inheritance the most I'm willing to do is to have a class with abstract functions (i.e. classes where some functions are empty but are expected to be filled out by the child class) but even then there are usually good alternatives to this.

Related to the above: simple is best. Simple is elegant. If you solve a problem with 4000 lines of code using a bunch of esoteric data structures and language quirks, but someone else did it in 10 then I'll pick the 10. On the other hand a one liner function that requires a lot of unpacking, like a Python function with a bunch of nested lambdas, might be easier to read if you split it up a bit more. Time to read and understand the code is the most important metric, more important than runtime or memory use. You can optimize for the other two later if you have to, but simple has to prevail for the first pass otherwise it's going to be hard for other people to understand. In fact, it'll be hard for you to understand too when you come back to it 3 months later without any context.

Note that I've cut a few things for simplicity. For example: VHDL doesn't quite require every line to run at the same time, but it's still a major paradigm of the language that isn't present in most other languages.

Ok that was a lot to read. I guess I have more to say about programming than I thought. But the core ideas are: Python is pretty good, other languages don't need to be scary, learn your data structures and algorithms and above all keep your code simple and clean.

[bob-the-seagull-king]

ICONpendium is OUT!

I've gone and released a web-tool for ICON 1.5, so people can easily reference content and even select their character choices so they can have it all compiled in one page!

Check it out at iconpendium.netlify.com :D!!