Viewing profile — mwd_

I'm not nostalgic about the old, low-resolution monitors though. The content in those design fits into 630/700 pixel wide columns and the 11 pixel text in Orchid Beauty looks tiny …

Interesting idea. I have an Android game that I've been working on for a while and I think it is pretty interesting but I just don't have the time to continue to polish it and mark…

One thing I find strange is how this Minnesota accent has come to represent "Canada's" accent in American pop culture. It is, unsurprisingly, somewhat similar to nearby parts of Ca…

I think this was from Le Journal de Paris. "Journal" in this case actually means "newspaper" -- it was a daily that ran from the 1770's to the 1840's. I have a copy, but sadly it h…

I think the search function is biased pretty heavily toward more popular titles. Even if you put an obscure word in your app's description, if it is not very popular it will be beh…

I'd love to give away free copies of my Android game but I don't think Google Play supports promo codes. You also can't start out with a free app and then convert to a paid app lat…

It's probably a lot easier to understand a larger project like a game or a website by trying to implement something substantial on your own. A lot of the obvious approaches to codi…

To give a sense of what the job market is like here in Vancouver, I know a few people who accepted great offers at Google or similar companies after getting only a couple of medioc…

There's no correlation I would guess that there is a very high correlation between CS degrees and programming or problem solving ability. I've worked in a pretty good lab full of g…

So I know the article isn't entirely serious, but the "score one for the robots" attitude seems pretty common and it's perplexing to me. Isn't this "score one for the humans", sinc…

I try to ignore this stuff. It doesn't really matter if he committed suicide or not, and the folk mythology is just silly. If you want to learn more about Turing and the Entscheidu…

This is what I do for Android games -- design things to be mutable and pre-allocate however many I'll need during a level. You also have to avoid foreach because it creates objects…

It's possible, but if I were a cash-obsessed Craigslist founder I think I would have sold the company a while ago and moved on to something else.

Craigslist is a privately-owned company and was actually a non-profit at one point. In the past Craig Newmark has talked about Craigslist as a tool for community organization and s…

Realistically, chances are that if you could come up with a good idea for a startup and successfully follow through before university, you will still be able to do it a few years l…

Part of the story here is that OpenGL ES isn't a new version of OpenGL, it's a different API for different platforms. It's nice if you can take old code and make it run on a mobile…

Cartels wouldn't have a business selling something like marijuana post-legalization. Just about anybody can grow it almost anywhere so its natural market value is extremely low. I …

These articles typically throw the ratio of female to male employees out there as a statistic. How do we know that gender discrimination is the biggest factor in the gender gap? It…

I wonder how much this industry could be or already is locked down by patents? Anybody know? The cynical part of me worries that, if this isn't bogged down by obstructionists, then…

Paul Buchheit wrote a good essay on identity called "I am nothing" which is closely related to "don't become anything": http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.ca/2011/08/i-am-nothing.html I …

You can't just sit down and start coding for your $150 or even $70/hr though. Here are some factors I can think of that change the calculation substantially: - You have to take tim…

The drive up to Eureka may not even hurt your chances at coming up with one of those key insights if you've been working a lot. Sometimes breaks are good, and as others have pointe…

Anybody have stories about negative consequences after they decided to leave at a normal time instead of staying late? I leave at 5, assuming everything's in order, and nobody has …

My advice to you is that a lot of the qualifications and requirements listed in job ads are pulled out of the air, and many of them are absurd. I've seen plenty of job ads listing …

I only did a master's degree, but the consensus among grad student friends is that graduate degrees are not worth it for money (maybe it's different if you go somewhere like MIT or…