(Archived) Commentary — Table Of Contents

The Marketplace Of Ideals

When I first learned programming, I was told—by peers, Internet tutorials—and later, when I was in university, by professors—a number of rules. They included ideas like “abstraction is good, to avoid lower level details”, “manual memory management is difficult and you should not do it”, “never write systems from scratch”. The justification for every rul…

2 years ago · 66 likes · 10 comments · Ryan Fleury

Software Kingdoms

Walk the streets of any major urban center in North America today and one thing becomes clear: the cracks of civilization are showing. It’s not uncommon to witness several instances of true human suffering—and sometimes depravity—in a brief walk across a few blocks. And while the modern Westerner’s attention span is remarkably short, anyone remotely hon…

2 years ago · 37 likes · 3 comments · Ryan Fleury

Regulation Cannot Save A Defeated Culture

Almost universally, people consider Big Tech responsible for numerous problems, and understandably so. Others have iterated these problems ad nauseum: exploitative and surveillance-driven business models, lack of respect for end-users, embarrassingly-terrible and complex software upon which entire industries rely, and quiet encroachment upon ownership…

2 years ago · 23 likes · 9 comments · Ryan Fleury

More Languages Won't Fix The Computing World

Programming computers always sounded awesome when I was a young kid. In my head, the possibilities were endless—someone could sit down at their computer, have an idea for a game, simulation, or animation, and gracefully go from having nothing to producing an interesting experience. Computers provided the ultimate form of expression that was magically in…

3 years ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · Ryan Fleury

Ships, Icebergs, Game Engines

Within the past week, The Machinery went from being a beloved from-scratch game engine project to being a seemingly-dead project. As far as I can tell, nobody seems to know why, other than perhaps Our Machinery themselves. Within the past few days, this email was sent to their users…

3 years ago · 17 likes · 4 comments · Ryan Fleury

The Gullible Software Altruist

Earlier this month, I deleted all of my repositories on GitHub and cancelled my recurring monthly payment. In its place, I set up a server to host my Git repositories and an accompanying website for both private and public projects—in effect, providing my own private “GitHub replacement…

3 years ago · 27 likes · 10 comments · Ryan Fleury

Computers, Ownership, Agency

I was 3 years old—this would be in 2001—when I first used a personal computer. I grew up around them, and I was fascinated enough to grow up and work professionally on their software. As a kid, my time on the computer was spent in a number of ways: I played video games, I read interesting articles to research new topics, I watched intriguing or entertai…

3 years ago · 26 likes · 7 comments · Ryan Fleury

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