Sometimes, I lie awake at night thinking about programming languages.

That’s all the intro I’ve got here, sorry. I felt like writing about the switch statement for some reason.

Not music nerds, obviously.

I don’t know anything about music. I know there are letters but sometimes the letters have squiggles; I know an octave doubles in pitch; I know you can write a pop song with only four chords. That’s about it.

The rest has always seemed completely, utterly arbitrary. Why do we have twelve notes, but represent them with only seven letters? Where did the key signatures come from? Why is every Wikipedia article on this impossible to read without first having read all the others?

A few days ago, some of it finally clicked. I feel like an idiot for not getting it earlier, but I suppose it doesn’t help that everyone explains music using, well, musical notation, which doesn’t make any sense if you don’t know why it’s like that in the first place.

Here is what I gathered, from the perspective of someone whose only music class was learning to play four notes on a recorder in second grade. I stress that I don’t know anything about music and this post is terrible. If you you so much as know how to whistle, please don’t read this you will laugh at me.

I love having tests.

I hate writing them.

It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s hard, sometimes harder than writing the code. Worst of all, it doesn’t feel like it accomplishes anything.

So I usually don’t do it. I know, I know. I should do it. I should also get more exercise and eat more vegetables.

The funny thing is, the only time I see anyone really praise the benefits of testing is when someone who’s really into testing extols the virtues of test-driven development. To me, that’s like trying to get me to eat my veggies by telling me how great veganism is. If I don’t want to do it at all, trying to sell me on an entire lifestyle is not going to work. I need something a little more practical, like “make smoothies” or “technically, chips are a vegetable”.

Here’s the best way I’ve found to make test smoothies. I’ll even deliberately avoid any testing jargon, since no one can agree on what any of it means anyway.

The web is a great thing that’s come a long way, yadda yadda. It used to be an obscure nerd thing where you could read black Times New Roman text on a gray background. Now, it’s a hyper popular nerd thing where you can read black Helvetica Neue text on a white background. I hear it can do other stuff, too.

That said, I occasionally see little nagging reminders that the web is still quite primitive in some ways. One such nag: it has almost no way to preserve attribution, and sometimes actively strips it.

As a programmer, I’m here to propose some technical solutions to this social problem. It’s so easy! Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?

I run veekun, a little niche Pokédex website that mostly focuses on (a) very accurate data for every version, derived directly from the games and (b) a bunch of nerdy nerd tools.

It’s been languishing for a few years. (Sorry.) Part of it is that the team has never been very big, and all of us have either drifted away or gotten tied up in other things.

And part of it is that the schema absolutely sucks to work with. I’ve been planning to fix it for a year or two now, and with Sun/Moon on the horizon, it’s time I actually got around to doing that.

Alas! I’m still unsure on some of the details. I’m hoping if I talk them out, a clear best answer will present itself. It’s like advanced rubber duck debugging, with the added bonus that maybe a bunch of strangers will validate my thinking.

(Spoilers: I think I figured some stuff out by the end, so you don’t actually need to read any of this.)

I’ve been trying really hard not to be a sourpuss about this, because everyone seems to enjoy it a lot and I don’t want to be the jerk pissing in their cornflakes.

And yet!

Despite all the potential of the game, despite all the fervor all across the world, it doesn’t tickle my fancy.

It seems like the sort of thing I ought to enjoy. Pokémon is kind of my jam, if you hadn’t noticed. When I don’t enjoy a Pokémon thing, something is wrong with at least one of us.

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

Maybe you have a Python 2 codebase. Maybe you’d like to make it work with Python 3. Maybe you really wish someone would write a comically long article on how to make that happen.

I have good news! You’re already reading one.

(And if you’re not sure why you’d want to use Python 3 in the first place, perhaps you’d be interested in the companion article which delves into exactly that question?)

Part of my Python FAQ, which is doomed to never be finished.

The short answer is: because it’s the actively-developed version of the language, and you should use it for the same reason you’d use 2.7 instead of 2.6.

If you’re here, I’m guessing that’s not enough. You need something to sweeten the deal. Well, friend, I have got a whole mess of sugar cubes just for you.

And once you’re convinced, you may enjoy the companion article, how to port to Python 3! It also has some more details on the diffences between Python 2 and 3, whereas this article doesn’t focus too much on the features removed in Python 3.

…is, of course, naming.

Not just naming variables or new technologies. Oh no. We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.

Apropos of nothing, I’d like to tell you a story. I’ve touched on this before, but this is the full version. It’s the story of hypothetical small-to-medium Internet community.

I’ve been trying to paint more lately, which means I have to actually think about color. Like an artist, I mean. I’m okay at thinking about color as a huge nerd, but I’m still figuring out how to adapt that.

While I work on that, here is some stuff about color from the huge nerd perspective, which may or may not be useful or correct.

I’m almost 30, so I have to start practicing being crotchety.

Okay, maybe not all video games, but something curious has definitely happened here. Please bear with me for a moment.

A year ago today was my last day working a tech job.

This post is about the thing in the title.

I used to work for Yelp. For historical reasons — probably “the initial developers preferred it” — their mostly-Python codebase had always been indented with tabs. That’s in stark contrast to the vast majority of the Python ecosystem, which generally uses the standard library’s style guide recommendation of four spaces. The presence of tabs caused occasional minor headaches and grumbles among the Python developers, who now numbered in the dozens and were generally used to spaces.

At the end of 2013, I bestowed Yelp with a Christmas gift: I converted their entire primary codebase from tabs to four spaces. On the off chance anyone else ever wants to do the same, here’s how I did it. Probably. I mean, it’s been two and a half years, but I wrote most of this at the time, so it should be correct.

Please note: I do not care what you think about tabs versus spaces. That’s for a different post! I no longer work for Yelp, anyway — so as compelling as your argument may be, I can no longer undo what I have done.

Update 2016-07-27: PICO-8 0.1.8 supports music export — export "foo%d.wav" while the music tab is selected in the editor!

Our PICO-8 game, Under Construction, contains some music that Mel composed.

The PICO-8 can only play music that you compose with the PICO-8, and it doesn’t have a music export. This posed a slight problem.

I solved that problem, and learned some things about audio along the way. None of this will be news to anyone who’s worked with sound before, but if you know as little about it as I do, you might find it as interesting as I did.

I used Perlin noise for the fog effect and title screen in Under Construction. I tweeted about my efforts to speed it up, and several people replied either confused about how Perlin noise works or not clear on what it actually is.

I admit I only (somewhat) understand Perlin noise in the first place because I’ve implemented it before, for flax, and that took several days of poring over half a dozen clumsy explanations that were more interested in showing off tech demos than actually explaining what was going on. The few helpful resources I found were often wrong, and left me with no real intuitive grasp of how and why it works.

Here’s the post I wish I could’ve read in the first place.

On January 1, 2015, I started learning to draw.

I’d made a couple brief attempts before, but nothing very serious. I’d eyeballed some official Pokémon artwork on two occasions, and that was pretty much it. I’d been dating an artist for seven years and had been surrounded by artist friends for nearly half my life, but I’d never taken a real crack at it myself.

On some level, I didn’t believe I could. It seemed so far outside the range of things I was already any good at. I’m into programming and math and computers and puzzles; aesthetics are way on the opposite end of a spectrum that only exists inside my head. Is it possible to bridge that huge, imaginary gap? Is it even allowed? (Spoilers: totally.)

In the ensuing sixteen months, a lot of people have — repeatedly — expressed surprise at how fast I’ve improved. I’ve then — repeatedly — expressed surprise at this surprise, because I don’t feel like I’m doing anything particularly special. I don’t have any yardstick for measuring artistic improvement speed; the artists I’ve known have always been drawing for years by the time I first met them. Plenty of people start drawing in childhood; not so many start at 27.

On the other hand, I do have 15 years’ experience of being alright at a thing. I suspect, in that time, I’ve picked up a different kind of skill that’s undervalued, invaluable, and conspicuously lacking from any curriculum: how to learn!

I don’t claim to be great at art, or even necessarily great at learning, but here are some things I’ve noticed myself doing. I hope that writing this down will, at the very least, help me turn it into a more deliberate and efficient process — rather than the bumbling accident it’s been so far.