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  As I'm coding with a technique I'm not yet fluent in (#RacingTheBeam), I'm being pretty slow. Enough that I'd like to have build a tool to automate the process. My instinct, through decades of professional experience, is to write tools to automate such things. The thing is, writing such tools requires experience, and premature automation is how you end up with the wrong tools. So, I guess I'll keep writing by hand for now, and I'll think about a...

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  I have my desktop computer back. I had bought it in the US before moving to Greece, I hadn't used it that much in the US because I packed it up soon after it was fully set up, it stayed in its box for a while after getting to Greece, got a temporary setup for a few months, then got to its permanent location but was waiting for a network connection. Now it's all set, I can properly sit down and use a machine that has plenty of processing power, cooling, RAM, storage...

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  For a change, an afternoon (early evening) coding session from the beach. I had a long deep nap at my mind feels right now as if it were morning, i.e. when I have the most focus and mental energy.

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  Life's hard, NOT. I'm coding on the beach. After spotting a beach spot that is in the shade during mornings, I now also have one that works for late afternoons. Meanwhile, pages and pages of code that race the beam. Yes, I'll get it done. No, I won't do it again by hand. Maybe, I'll push the idea further toward a rupture technique. #Z80 #Assembly #RetroComputing #RacingTheBeam #AmstradCPC

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  Nooooo, must resist writing my own compression routines, nooooo! Mostly, because every time I've tried I ended up losing momentum and giving up. And it's a domain where it's difficult to be both efficient and simple.

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  Call me old-school, but I'm a believer in reproducible hermetic builds, and I find myself struggling with fancy new languages whose default build systems download things at build time. Literally, source code that was working a few weeks ago, now fails, unchanged, because it depends on something that was removed from a server somewhere.

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  No matter how much I try to write actual product code, I always have an itch to write tools instead. Very commonly, I want to explore compression approaches, especially in the domain of #RetroComputing graphics (where compressing whole bytes in memory order might not be the optimal approach). I'm gonna try to find a balance, make progress on the demo I'm writing, and think about compression at the same time.

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  Premature optimization strikes again. About 6 months ago, I was writing some compression code. That code never got to the point where it was actually functional, not even for a simple use case. I also didn't write tests for it. But, oh boy did I architect it, splitting it into small units, scattering it all over the place. And now I can't follow it. I didn't document it enough. But at the same time what I can see is too rigid for what I want to do. It's probabl...

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  I need to stop trying to optimize everything. It's OK if my file header uses ~30 bytes during the experimentation phase (I haven't even reached the research phase), even if there's a chance of shrinking it to less than half that. I can deal with a waste of a dozen bytes, and it'll be a good thing if I ever reach the point where that's a limiting factor.

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  I'm writing C, but I really want classes, so I could decide to use primitive C++ (the way C++ looked 30+ years ago). If I don't, C coders hate that my code looks like C++, C++ coders hate that I code in C. If I do, C coders hate that I use C++, C++ coders hate that I don't use modern C++ features. Everybody is unhappy if I code in Rust, myself included. In the end, the code is mostly for me, I'll write it the way I want. And that means C with odd constructs. I...

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  #Introduction Hi, I'm JBQ / Djaybee, I'm a programmer interested in retrocomputing. I used to own an Amstrad CPC as well as several machines from the Atari ST range. Back in the day, I had written several demos for the Atari ST, and I am trying to get back in the demo scene, currently aiming for the Amstrad CPC. On this account, you'll mostly find a live-blog of my thought processes while coding, which therefore might not be fully accurate or consistent.