Strangelights

I woke up early a couple of days ago and to pass the time till the rest of the house woke up, I decided to do a little hobby programming. I wanted to do a little animation around a star fractal. I didn't find the Koch snowflake aesthetically pleasing, so I thought I'd make my own based on a tree fractal algorithm that I knew gave pleasing results. This got lost somewhere a long the way and I ended up reducing my goal to creating a pleasing tree.

Rather than talk about the structure of the code, which is pretty simple, I thought it would interesting to review the sequence of images I created and talk about the decisions I made to come up with the next version. The code to produce the images is available on github.com/robertpi/FractalTree and will be linked to, if you want to see what the code changes look like. I didn't store my earlier version of the algorithm in git, so some of the earlier versions have been reversed engineered from later versions, but I think they're pretty close to what I had.

The organization Black Girls Code was brought to my attention by "FSharpConf" and I decided to donate some money to them.

I've heard that a small portion of the F# community was vocal in disagreeing with the conference organizers prompting Black Girls Code. One of the conference organizers, Gien, has already written an excellent post summarizing the arguments put to her and rebuking them. I thought I would add my voice to why I think organization like Black Girls Code are important.

Recently a conversation made me think about the current state of .NET. Someone from outside the .NET community asked me if .NET ran on Linux. The answer is that .NET has great cross platform support, running on Windows, Linux, maxOS, Android, iOS, WebAssembly, but I can see why someone from outside .NET might think that it didn't.

There are still a few nuances when it comes to cross platform support in the .NET world, but I think that's true of most development platforms today. This post aims to explain those nuances.

A little while ago I send a PR to fix a performance bug in Fornax, the static website generator in written in F#. This bug was so typical of performance issues that I have seen over the years I thought I do a quick write up.

Noticing the bug

Like so many others I felt sad when I heard the news Skill Matter had gone into administration. Many words have been exchange on twitter about what tragedy it was, so rather than add to that, I thought I’d share some of happy memories of them.

I can’t remember the exact date I first started working with Skills Matter, but it seems likely it was around 10 years ago. I remember the occasion very well.

I’ve had an unhealthy fascination with Bitcoin and crypto currencies for a while now. I’m writing this article because there seems to be a gap in the market for an explanation of how Bitcoin works and thinking on the consequences of that. When the popular media covers Bitcoins it inevitably skips over important details, when technical bloggers cover Bitcoin they tend to get too bogged down in the details of the cryptography. This is an attempt to provide something in between, an explanation that anyone with reasonable grasp on computing will understand.