Tales of a developer

I want to describe my first iteration of  exsim , the core server for the large scale simulation I described in my last  blog post . A  Listener  module opens a socket for listening to incoming connections. Once a connection is made, a process is spawned for handling the login and the listener continues listening for new connections. Once logged in, a  Player  is created, and a  Solarsystem  is started (if it hasn't already). The solar system also starts a  PhysicsProxy , and the player starts a  Ship . These are all GenServer processes. The source for this is up on GitHub:  https://github.com/snorristurluson/exsim Player The player takes ownership of the TCP connection and handles communication with the game client (or bot). Incoming messages are parsed in  handle_info/2  and handled by the player or routed to the ship, as appropriate. The player creates the ship in its  init/1  function. The state for the player holds the ship and the name of the player. Ship

Learning new things is important for every developer. I've mentioned  this before, and in the spirit of doing just that, I've started a somewhat ambitious project. I want to do a large-scale simulation, using  Elixir  and Go , coupled with a physics simulation in C++. I've never done anything in Elixir before, and only played a little bit with Go, but I figure,  how hard can it be ? Exsim I've dubbed this project exsim - it's a simulation done in Elixir. Someday I'll think about a more catchy name - for now I'm just focusing on the technical bits. Here's an overview of the system as I see it today: exsim  sits at the heart of it - this is the main server, implemented in Elixir. exsim-physics  is the physics simulation. It is implemented in C++, using the Bullet physics library. exsim-physics-viewer  is a simple viewer for the state of the physics simulation, written in Go. exsim-bot  is a bot for testing exsim, written in Go.

My employer laid a bunch off people yesterday. While I still have a job, this makes me really sad. I feel bad for those people that didn't have a job to go to this morning - some of them have worked here a long time, some of them are good friends, some acquaintances, some I can't really say I know. I'm sure they will find good jobs elsewhere - unemployment here in Iceland is very low these days, but then again, there aren't that many game developers. For some, this will mean not only changing jobs, but moving to a different country, on a very short notice. While that can be exciting, it can also be very upsetting. I mostly feel disappointed. I really believed this company had evolved past this sort of behavior. We've seen layoffs here before - it was painful, and we've really made an effort of avoiding getting ourselves into this situation. Or so I thought. Shifting focus is sometimes - often, maybe - necessary. I just wish companies could do that without

I've added search and trim to my  expiring records  module in Erlang. This started out as an  in-memory  key/value store, that I then migrated over to  using Mnesia  and eventually to a  replicated Mnesia  table. The  fetch/1  function is already doing a simple query, with  match_object . Result = mnesia : match_object ( expiring_records , # record { key = Key , value = '_' , expires_at = '_' }, read ) The three parameters there are the name of the table -  expiring_records , the matching pattern and the lock type (read lock). The  fetch/1  function looks up the key as it was added to the table with  store/3 . If the key is a tuple, we can also do a partial match: Result = mnesia : match_object ( expiring_records , # record { key = { '_' , " bongo " }, value = '_' , expires_at = '_' }, read ) I've added a  search/1  function the module that takes in a matching pattern and returns a list of items wh

Earlier this year I started experimenting with the  Xmpp   protocol , and implemented bots in Python to communicate with an Xmpp server. I've now revisited those bots and reimplemented them in  Go . I've been meaning to learn Go for quite a while, and this seemed like a reasonable first project to tackle. The source code lives on GitHub:  https://github.com/snorristurluson/xmpp-chatbot If you are an experienced Go developer, I would appreciate any feedback and suggestions on how to improve the code - if you are just starting out with Go like myself, I hope this blog and the code is useful to you. As  before , I'm using  Prosody  to communicate with. Just like I did in Python, my first experiment is to simply open up a socket and poke the server to see where that takes us: func main () { conn , err := net. Dial ( " tcp " , " localhost:5222 " ) if err != nil { fmt. Errorf ( " Couldn't connect " ) } messa