A tale of carelessness and stupidity
I’ve been working with version control systems for most of two decades now, so I really should know better. Since starting out with CVS, it’s been drilled in to me:
check in your source, the stuff you can’t recover if you lost it
There’s never an exception to this rule, and if you think there is, think again. I mean it: literally take the time to think about your exception properly, then realise why you should still version control that file.
This is a short tale of careless autocomplete, a quirk of Unix, and a hastily assembled .gitignore …
A static-site approach to preference management
Opening links in a new window — or a new tab for the best part of twenty years — has always been a hot button issue. Many writers feel like it’s the sensible thing to do in order to ‘keep a reader on your page/site’, whilst usability practitioners despair at what they see as annoying and counterintuitive behaviour that ignores the user’s wishes. In Linking to a new tab vs. same tab, Jesse Summers argues that:
If a user clicks on a link, they shouldn’t be surprised by what happens.
and I mostly agree. There are noted exceptions but, generally speaking, the web’s default has always been to replace a page with the target of the link, and that expectation should be maintained. …
Tracing the DNA between a brand new game and a selection of classics
The survival sub-genre has emerged into the limelight in recent years; it combines parts of several other genres, depending on which game you play. Typically, there are dire circumstances, scarce resources, and the need for the player to craft what they need from those resources in various clever ways. Games as far-ranging as the classic Oregon Trail all the way to this year’s Ground Zero fall into this category in some way, but they share a common DNA. Let’s look at several of these titles to see what elements connect them.
The Survivalists (2020)
The Survivalists is, unsurprisingly, a survival game, but it’s one with a big difference. Whilst other games in the genre task the player with carrying out a lot of the work themselves, grinding away to gather resources with which to craft, The Survivalists provides some help, in the form of monkeys. …
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