Phil's Musings notes from a peripatetic programmer

Time 2020-11-04 21:04:58

Web Name: Phil's Musings notes from a peripatetic programmer

WebSite: http://philschatz.com

ID:105099

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notes,Musings,Phil,

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I want kids to play games that don’t talk down to them, encourage them to figure out game mechanics on their own, and I want non-sighted people to play video games.Introducing: the puzzlescript package.Many games have puzzles sprinkled in, but I like ones that are distilled into just solving puzzles.I first realized how engrossing these were while playing The Witness with friends. One person would control the player but everyone would be solving the puzzle in their head just by watching. We played together for days.Then, I tried it with kids. It turns out, a 6-year-old grasped the puzzle concepts in The Witness faster than her parents and was explaining to her parents how the puzzles worked.Then, I started looking for more and stumbled upon increpare’s awesome PuzzleScript.Unlike other video games that tend to teach kids to memorize facts (like “Carmen San Diego”, “Oregon Trail”, or “Math Blaster”), these encourage kids to think critically, and problem-solve in groups.Specifically, PuzzleScript games are interesting because the whole game is a text file and the levels are typically pretty small. This means it’s easy for kids to explore but it also makes the games playable by people that can’t see. The reason is that all of the sprites have human-readable names. So we can read those out instead of just showing colored pixels.BackgroundInspiration came from both the tons of easter-eggs found in software (Chrome Dino Game, various Microsoft ones and commandline tools) as well as a desire to get more people in general to play video games.Goals get kids in classrooms playing these games get vision-impaired people playing these games get 404 pages to have these games when something is broken (like the Chrome Dino Game). Example: this website’s 404 page get people to play these instead of Sudoku to exercise their brains moreGames can run embedded in a webpage or in a commandline terminal. There are over 200 games to choose from!TerminalAll you need is node 4 or higher and then run the following:npm install --global puzzlescriptpuzzlescriptSee philschatz/puzzlescript for examples.Embed in a Webpage body table id="the-game-ui" /table script src="https://unpkg.com/puzzlescript@3.0.0/lib/webpack-output.js" /script script const gameSourceString = '...' // Source code for the game const table = document.querySelector('#the-game-ui') const engine = new PuzzleScript.TableEngine(table) engine.setGame(gameSourceString, 0 /*startLevel*/) engine.start() /script /body Visit the demo page to play several games (there are over 200), or see this website’s 404 page for an example of using it in a 404 page.For Next TimeI would like to go through more details on how the code is organized. But if something does not work or is not clear, create an issue.More ExamplesMirror Isles (original)More examples can be found in the README or see the demo page to play them in a browser. Keep Reading... 15 May 2017 Creating mock HTTP requests seems to be the go-to method for developers.But wouldn’t is be easier if you could just point your tests to a server and record the HTTP responses and then play them back?Now there is fetch-vcr!Since fetch API is in browsers, there is an easier way to do this in JavaScript!fetch-vcr will record and play back those HTTP requests for you.How does it work?Just load the fetch-vcr package in your tests and it will proxy any calls to fetch(url, options).Each HTTP response is saved to the filesystem as a cassette (also known as a fixture).The cassette contains all of the response headers and the response body.Depending on the VCR_MODE it will do the following: playback: (default) it will load the recorded cassette of the request instead of talking to the server record: it will talk to the server and save the response to a local file (cassette) cache: it will try to load the cassette and if the cassette is not found, it will do the same thing as recordBecause it saves files to the filesystem, it works slightly differently when used in NodeJS and when used in a browser.How does it work in NodeJS?It’s super-simple. When running tests: Make sure your code runs var fetch = require('fetch-vcr'); instead of var fetch = require('node-fetch'); Record your cassettes by running VCR_MODE=record npm test instead of just npm test Optionally, change the directory that cassettes are saved to by running fetchVCR.configure({fixturePath: '/path/to/folder/'})For browser tests it is a little bit more complicated because browsers do not save files to the filesystem.Fortunately, browsers like PhantomJS or Selenium allow you to send data from the browser using alert(msg). There are other ways if you would rather do it differently.You can use the steps listed above but will need to do the following additional steps: Pass the VCR_MODE environment variable to the browser Replace fetchVCR.saveFile(rootPath, filename, contents) = Promise with a function that calls alert(JSON.stringify([rootPath, filename, contents])) Parse the alerts and save them to disk using fs.writeFile(filePath, contents) Note: This code does not run in the browser; it runs in the JS file given to PhantomJS (or Selenium if you are using Selenium) 06 Apr 2016 At openstax.org different projects use different ticket trackers because different people have different likes and preferences. We use Trello, Pivotal, GitHub Issues, and Wunderlist. But one thing that is common across all of our open source projects is GitHub.As we’ve grown and as our projects have started to overlap we’ve realized there is value in having a common place to look and see what’s going on in all of the projects.gh-board does all the things we need and more. If it doesn’t do something, submit a Pull Request and it will!Other ticket trackersAny ticket tracker presents additional friction to use with GitHub: the logins are different so @mentioning people is annoying you have to remember a different type of markup language you have to remember to link everything twice so people looking at the ticket can get to the code and vice-versa you have to update the tracker when the Pull Request status changes (created, review, tested, merged, etc) they don’t show the state of Pull Requests so you then have to click to see what the Pull Request status is URL’s are difficult to share because frequently the state of the page is not in the URL ie which milestones, columns, or other filter criteria are being usedAs a developer/tester/UX: you’d still have to check multiple places to stay on top of everything (or hope that your email client doesn’t explode!)GitHub isn’t perfect eitherBut GitHub Issues is not without its limitations: It is difficult to add additional metadata to a ticket There is no easy way to have kanban-style columnsIt has a few features that other ticket trackers lack (like huboard or waffleio): real-time collaborative editing of Issues shows the state of related Issues/Pull Requests shows CI status and merge conflict status has charts (burndown, gantt, etc) keeps track of multiple repositories from different organizations and productivity-enhancing Easter Eggs! CI Status shows up as a green check mark or a red x on the top-right corner of a card Merge conflicts are shown with a yellow warning and have a diagonal striped background Real-time Collaborative EditingIssue ImagesIf an Issue or Pull Request contains an image then it will be shown in the IssueEaster EggsPlus, it comes with productivity-enhancing easter eggs you can unlock!ChartsSince it stores all the open and closed tickets locally, we can generate all the fancy charts that other ticket trackers generate. Burnup chart: it clearly shows when new work is added to a Milestone Gantt chart: shows when milestones are due and colors the bar based on the status of all the Issues uses octokat.js and polls the GitHub API for changes uses the 1st repository in the list to find the column labels and milestones columns are defined as labels of the form ## - Column Title or you can specify a regular expression 02 Apr 2016 As a programmer that uses GitHub, Pull Requests are a great way to discuss code but whenever I get feedback on code in a large codebase it is annoying to have to find where that change was. Since I use atom.io as my text editor, I decided to write a plugin that adds a great feature of GitHub (Pull Requests) into my text editor (which also happens to be written by GitHub). And viola! pull-requests.Whenever you check out a branch that has a Pull Request and open it in GitHub, you’ll see the GitHub comment directly on the line of code inside atom. And to help you find it, the Tree view on the left will show how many comments are in the directory so you can find the file.Here’s a slightly out-of-date screencast showing the whole process (including installing the plugin):How’s it made?It uses the octokat.js npm package and the linter atom package. pull-requests checks if your code is in a git repository (actually, a GitHub one) and then checks if the branch corresponds to a Pull Request in the repository (or the parent repository if this is a forked repository) and pulls out the comments on the changes of a file.Then, it uses linter to add lint messages on the lines of the files. Since linter supports HTML, pull-requests also converts the comment into HTML (complete with emojis) and adds a link to get back to the Pull Request on GitHub so you can continue discussing.Hope that helps you! Keep Reading... 09 Jun 2015 OpenStax isn’t going anywhere; we have a ton of high-quality content and are revolutionizing textbook publishing for the benefit of students. But here are my thoughts on how it could be made a bit more open (and cheaper to boot!).ProblemAs background, openstax books contain a few pieces: an editor for creating a part of a book (Aloha) and organizing parts of a book into a Table of Contents rules for attribution (who authored the book) a way to convert the book into various formats (ePUB and PDF) a way to read the book online for free a way to mix-and-match and create a new book Ideally, openstax will have a way to allow others to suggest edits to a book All book content is stored directly in GitHub (see sources for examples) Replace the editor with oerpub/github-book-editor which saves directly to GitHub Replace the web view with Autogenerated Sites using GitHub (see philschatz.com/books and the various book repositories ) Replace PDF (and ePub) generation with travis-ci or philschatz/pdf-ci (Every time GitHub updates, generate a new PDF) Support Derived copies using GitHub’s “Fork” Support “Suggested Edits” (which openstax used to have) via GitHub’s Pull Requests Support a diff of “Suggested Edits” via GitHub’s Markdown diff view (see blog post on books in GitHub) Support software (and content) development using something on top of GitHub Issues like huboard or ideally philschatz/gh-board (no server/subscription required) No server costs! (except PDF generation which can be minimized) autogenerated PDFs for every edition (see GitHub Tags and Releases) easy contributions from the entire world travis-ci can make sure the Markdown is well-formed Each book needs to be a separate repository (cannot “easily” combine multiple books into 1) Need to learn MarkDown (specifically kramdown) unless the editor is “smart enough”

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