I'm Daniel, Diego's brother who also worked on this project. Your question is a bit broad, but I can tell you what it was like to work with emscripten.
We used emscripten to compile our C++ application to WASM and to generate the JS code that loads the application. This part was very easy. We had the game running on the web in no time.
What was much much more difficult was working with emscripten's APIs to do things like handle mouse / touch / keyboard inputs. There's tons of gotchas and weird limitations to work through.
Another huge challenge was in sending data between the JavaScript layer and the C++ application. You have to serialize data and then parse it on the C++ side, which sounds easy until you try to do it.
We faced some tough challenges asynchronously loading the paintings. Our initial solution of using a simple thread pool library which manages web workers didn't run on Safari due to some strange incompatibilities with WebGL 2.0, so we had to go for a purely web worker based approach.
Overall, we are amazed at what you can do with emscripten, but you have to be prepared to face some bad documentation, browser incompatibilities, and to tinker A LOT.
I agree with you, Dan, and Adam Wathan for that matter.
The point of my comment had more to do with front-loading of a pitch with copy specifically tailored for confirmation bias.
Running to achieve weight loss can be hard. So much so that it's intended value can't be realized, or even be detrimental to the end goal. But I think we'd agree that anyone who simply says says "Running won't help you lose weight because it doesn't work, try this instead" is not seeking to help you, just sell you.
This was also React's initial pitch as well: getting DOM updates right is hard, use vDom instead!
The truth is that the majority of frontend development is devs racing to shovle the latest stack of tickets that management cooked up with little collaboration or rhyme and reason into the Done column of JIRA (web dev is particularly imperiled by shitty lay management), any DX affordance they can get their hands on is valuable to this goal
Concurrently, designers are pumping out comps as fast as possible to match pace with no real system cohering the whole thing, you need a design system to provide an "abstract interface", so to speak, for your CSS to really transcend into real separation.
This is just what I've observed working at my comp
I'm not sure why this comment is getting downvoted. I have read a lot of Nassim Taleb and completely agree with your comment.
He is a modern philosopher with really valuable insights about how to navigate the world given all of our biases and inability to accept the role of uncertainty in just about everything we do.
This is awesome. How did you end up working on projects like this one? This kind of interactive one-off experiences are something I've been interested in for a long time.
Hi there! I'm the creator of this little project. It's a Chrome extension to help you manage your tabs in Chrome. I'm sure some of you can relate to how awful it is having 50+ tabs open all the time across multiple windows (I'm looking at you StackOverflow).
This light weight extension lets you find tabs quickly through fuzzy-search. It also lets you store collections of tabs so you can open them later.
I'm happy to have finally completed ONE side project! Thanks for checking this out!
Hi there! I'm the author of this little project. Managing tabs in Chrome is a terrible pain for me - I always end up with a ton of open tabs that make using Chrome really awful. This extension aims to solve that problem.
Give Gibbon Tabs a try! It's extremely light. I guarantee it won't make Chrome slow :-)
Any feedback is welcome! If you don't feel like reading the README, you can watch this 2 minute video to get the gist of this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4AHNVJXIS0
I'm from Venezuela, and happen to know a few people that are mining bitcoin down there. Electricity is incredibly cheap! You practically don't have to factor electricity costs in your operation. Yes, the grid is very unstable, but you can always by generators that run on gasoline (which is also incredibly cheap! a full tank of gas for your car will cost less than 0.1 USD.)
Now, this is obviously horrible for the environment. But what can you expect when your own currency is being rapidly destroyed by the power-hungry idiots that have taken hold of the country. Let's hope for a brighter future.
I have actually been living in Canada for 4 years now. Everything is a very hairy mess; I was there in the summer of 2015 and remember thinking "Wow! Things can't get possibly worst than this", and then I went back unexpectedly late this year and I can't tell you how much worst things are looking.
The infrastructure is collapsing, finding food to eat is a game of going to every supermarket in the city, among other things. I think my Dad puts it really well when he says that Venezuela has had a reversal of all the progress we made for decades; people have lost a lot of their values simply because life is so tough.
The main point is that you need to be holding a currency that isn't the bolivar, because the year-over-year inflation rate is something like EIGHT HUNDRED PERCENT as of Dec 2016.
USD, Bitcoin, commodities, food ... anything has better return than that.
Yeah. I think the point I was addressing is that if you had government contacts, you wouldn't need bitcoin.
You'd be squeezing your contacts for hard currency, which is simultaneously more lucrative and easier than mining bitcoin. Bitcoin is for people who are locked out of official exchange rates.
I was taught functional programming through SML in university two years ago. I have never had my brain twisted with so many interesting and clever concepts - it was one of the most valuable semesters I had, and my favourite class.
Go learn functional programming if you haven't, it will force you to look at problem with a new set of eyes!
I spent some time in Seattle last summer. I was really impressed by the LEED certifications that a lot of the buildings in the downtown area have; most of them are certified gold - the spaces seem really nice for working!
I'm Daniel, Diego's brother who also worked on this project. Your question is a bit broad, but I can tell you what it was like to work with emscripten.
We used emscripten to compile our C++ application to WASM and to generate the JS code that loads the application. This part was very easy. We had the game running on the web in no time.
What was much much more difficult was working with emscripten's APIs to do things like handle mouse / touch / keyboard inputs. There's tons of gotchas and weird limitations to work through.
Another huge challenge was in sending data between the JavaScript layer and the C++ application. You have to serialize data and then parse it on the C++ side, which sounds easy until you try to do it.
We faced some tough challenges asynchronously loading the paintings. Our initial solution of using a simple thread pool library which manages web workers didn't run on Safari due to some strange incompatibilities with WebGL 2.0, so we had to go for a purely web worker based approach.
Overall, we are amazed at what you can do with emscripten, but you have to be prepared to face some bad documentation, browser incompatibilities, and to tinker A LOT.