Filip Hráček / text /

Index

I've written a lot of articles over the years. Some of them are over at selfimproving.dev, others on Medium. Most of those are of a particular theme (software development and Flutter & Dart, respectively), and will stay where they are.

But for a long time, I wanted a place of my own on which to publish my articles. Not really a “blog”, as it’s really just static pages generated from Markdown files. But something close to that.

Articles:

• Shove your AI features where the sun don’t shine
  A diatribe.
• Making a tile-based game look like it’s not
  Hide tiles from the player using these three weird gamedev tricks.
• Your science is not strong enough
  On explaining things simply and the fake “Albert Einstein” quote.
• A.I. is a printed birthday card train to Paris
  In which I use a few short anecdotes to illuminate the Scylla and Charybdis that is A.I.
• Making my 1970’s-style renderer multi-threaded
  A tech deep dive into multi-threading in Flutter & Dart.
• IfChange ThenChange
  I miss Google’s LINT.IfChange.
• I don’t think about «your tech» at all
  Here’s what to do when someone on the internet says that some technology they’re not using 'is dead'.
• How to playtest a video game
  So you've been asked to playtest a game for a friend or a stranger. Here’s how to be the most helpful.
• The two types of open source
  Let’s stop pretending that “without warranty” means “without expectation”.
• The revenge of Server Side Includes (SSI)
  How a technology from 1993 makes so much sense for today’s “Indie Small Web”.
• “Math minus math” is wild
  I love this self-published little book from 2009 full of abstract math-inspired graphic art.
• Performance versus Preference
  Why the C programming language won over Lisp, why QWERTY is winning over Dvorak, and why our favorite hyperfixations aren’t as successful as they “obviously” deserve.
• Benchmarking Flutter, Flame, Unity and Godot
  What happens when you decide to benchmark Flutter as if it was a 2D game development framework.
• Welcome to the superstar economy
  It’s when “relatively small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and seem to dominate the fields in which they engage” (Sherwin Rosen, 1981).
• Respectfully, socialism is a bad idea
  I grew up in actual socialism, behind the Iron Curtain, and I find it a little bit worrying to see all these cool people promoting socialism these days.
• We need technology that is less immersive, not more
  How come so many of the most talented engineers of our time work on making our entertainment more immersive?
• (Personally) sustainable social media
  How does one use social media without falling into its traps?
• The engineering principles behind GIANT ROBOT GAME
  How this weird game is being built.
• Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed
  How to keep an external brain using ideas from 1945 and technology from 2023.
• Videogames that teach you stuff
  Videogames like SimCity or Dwarf Fortress aren’t exactly “educational”, but they still teach you a lot.

Hope you enjoy at least some of them.

— Filip Hráček

Filip is a pro­gram­ming buff with formal train­ing in jour­nal­ism. He worked in Sili­con Valley, now he’s based in Prague. He builds games, teaches pro­gram­ming, explains things, and creates silly soft­ware experiments.

His main project these days is GIANT ROBOT GAME (Steam link).

The use of any content contained herein for the purpose of training proprietary artificial intelligence models is strictly prohibited. Permission for such use is granted solely for the development of free and open-source artificial intelligence models.

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