This is one of those intersections of art and engineering that never fail to delight me. The sheer scale of effort required to manually code individual sound instructions to get around the hardware’s technical limitations is insane to me. That’s a labor of love. And the end result is often beautiful enough to stand on its own as ambient music.
The Beret Factor
Kids, are you ready for an exciting career in mobile app development?
Online Real-Time
Two Christmases ago was a busy season for funerals. I wrote to you about it.
Among the losses was a new friend and coworker, whom we'd dubbed "Online Real-Time" for his general lack of a brain-to-mouth filter. That's a character defect for most people, but Justin was such a genuinely good man that it was nearly always on the endearing-to-hilarious spectrum.
So. Fifteen minutes ago I was updating one of my code repos at work. I pulled down my counterpart's latest changes, tried to do a build, and my development environment complained that it couldn't find a new form interface it needed:
We hide things in the software you run. We bury our frustrations in comments. We name things after inside jokes. I once got a bug fix ticket that simply read "please make your error logging less witty."
Sometimes we bury a tribute where you will never see it.
Nerds, you can be pretty great sometimes.