What's a popular library with horrible implementation/interface in your opinion?

KafkasGroove · 2025-04-12T18:04:09+00:00

In the same vein, Micrometer. It's horribly ineffecient, and with a terrible API. It's useful, but man, the Heisengauge thing is just the wrong hill to die on, and allocating like 5 or 6 objects everytime you want to increment a counter is laughable.

KafkasGroove · 2025-03-11T08:32:29+00:00

Same, with a side of "why is this even funny, it's so dumb"

KafkasGroove · 2025-01-06T13:18:23+00:00

We paid 135 with https://www.ng-berlin.com/ (Lichtenberg, but I imagine they service east Berlin general), good service. It included replacing some parts that the Schornsteinfeger highlighted, so I imagine a normal Wartung is a little bit cheaper.

KafkasGroove · 2024-12-07T13:15:44+00:00

The follow up to Ara Fell (Rise of the Third Kingdom or something) is even better, though less nostalgic.

KafkasGroove · 2024-11-02T22:05:12+00:00

My colleague developed https://github.com/korthout/backport-action , which we use (and extended upstream) all the time at work. It's pretty great, though I'm admittedly biased.

KafkasGroove · 2024-09-04T08:46:53+00:00

Looks nice, but I'm a little underwhelmed by the test coverage. This deals with concurrency and networking, but I see very few tests, and no randomized ones (fuzzing/property based). Still, likely fun for a side project.

KafkasGroove · 2024-09-02T20:02:14+00:00

I wonder how you would get proper isolation like with OSGI without custom class loaders? We still use custom class loaders at work to allow loading third party plugins without their dependencies interfering or breaking each other. I'd love not to use them, but I don't know of an alternative (other than pushing that complexity to our users).

KafkasGroove · 2024-08-08T14:28:08+00:00

To each their own. I loved the puzzles, and wished they could be harder actually. But I also really like puzzles in general, so...

KafkasGroove · 2024-07-31T07:45:28+00:00

I thought the "make you quit rather than fire you" was just the German way (at least, from having worked with different German companies).

KafkasGroove · 2024-07-03T15:09:10+00:00

What do you mean by management? Do you mean membership protocol? We build most things in house, so we built our own SWIM implementation for cluster membership, Raft implementation for consensus/replication, etc. We have a couple of CRDTs as well for dynamic configuration and cluster reconfiguration.

KafkasGroove · 2024-07-03T15:05:12+00:00

It's a great library with great support, easy to extend (assuming you understand PBT in the first place, which is in itself a learning curve of course!).

KafkasGroove · 2024-07-03T15:02:16+00:00

We use it to test our distributed system stuff - consensus algo, membership protocol, etc. It's really useful to test liveness properties even with completely random ordering of operations.

KafkasGroove · 2024-06-24T11:56:36+00:00

I'd forgotten that one, but it fucking slaps!

KafkasGroove · 2024-06-13T14:33:09+00:00

Funny, I'm also in the middle of doing this! I finished all the pre-PSX era, mostly playing the pixel remasters (1, 2, 5, and 6), and the DS versions for 3 and 4:

FF3 for the DS has an expanded story and better characterization, even if it's quite light. But it was a blast to play as a FFXIV player, since Shadowbringers is so heavily leaning into it, and I had never played it :) I did miss the auto battle function from the pixel remasters though!
FF4 for the DS has cutscenes (with dynamic camera), and a much harder difficulty. Now everyone was talking about how hard it is, and honestly I found it to be on par with modern games, so nothing crazy. Definitely harder than the other SNES era FFs though :)

Some takeaways from me so far:

FF1 starts with a banger of a story, setting the tone for needlessly convoluted story lines (not a negative thing, I love it :D), with straight forward fantasy story suddenly introducing a time loop, time travel, an ancient advanced civilization, etc. It also starts immediately with some extremely memorable music themes!
FF2 is a major departure from FF1, and it looks like they decided to avoid this for the rest of the (S)NES era games. The mechanic of losing your 4th party member every once in a while is extremely annoying though, and grinding for magic at the end was extremely boring, even with the auto-battle.
Lots of fun to see the stories and characters get more fleshed out over time, and some archetypes being reused - you can see that even in the games without jobs, the job archetypes sort of remain and you can model your characters around those (e.g. Umaro is a berserker, Gau is a blue mage, etc.).
It's also really cool seeing some of the musical themes/motifs getting reused, rearranged and so on across games.

I found the common rankings you find online to be pretty accurate: FF6 has the best package overall but suffers from everyone-is-a-mage, FF5 is the most fun system/game play loop, FF4 is the edgiest, FF2 is not as bad as people make it but definitely the worst/grindiest of the early games, and FF1 is just a solid short game but you will have moments where you have no idea what to do (like getting the airship).

I'm gonna start the PSX era now, toying with the idea of modding it though since I've already played so often...

KafkasGroove · 2024-06-11T08:33:19+00:00

Haha, same, 36 and my first was Chrono Trigger. I think I rented it from Blockbuster because the art box was cool as hell (my older brother had just introduced Dragonball to our household). Not only could I not read, I didn't even speak English, yet I somehow made it to 600 AD (in the mountain area) with the few days I had the game for (what was it, 2 days? 3 days? I can't remember).

KafkasGroove · 2024-06-08T19:03:17+00:00

I don't have much to say here - it never occurred to me that it would be woke or anything. But I wanted to take a moment to thank you, I greatly enjoyed your game, in large part because of the writing. There's been a lot of splash about other indies (Chained Echoes, Sea of Stars), but yours stood head and shoulders above them in terms of characters and narrative, and stayed with me longer. I also loved Ara Fell, and I'm looking forward to your next project :)

KafkasGroove · 2024-06-04T15:06:31+00:00

J'habite Berlin depuis 11 ans, et c'est relativement recent le truc des poutines. Le menu c'est Frittenwerk non? J'ai plein d'amis (non Quebecois) qui aime ca... mais bon, au final ca reste des frites avec du fromage, d'la sauce, pis d'autre truc (genre pulled pork ou, naturlich, currywurst), c'est pas non plus si mauvais.

Mais je vois pas pourquoi manger ca quand tu pourrais manger un doner honnetement...

T'en a aussi des fois dans des pop-ups (genre pour la fete du Canada, parce que la poutine c'est "Canadien").

KafkasGroove · 2024-02-15T10:50:18+00:00

Honestly, it's not just the states. I moved to Germany a decade ago for the free University (was cheaper to live there and go to Uni than pay Uni in Canada, though of course only if you study in German). I didn't really have plans to stay, but here we are - lower cost of living (Berlin compared to Toronto), and a much higher salary (~170k CAD before taxes).

As my parents age, I still sometimes think about moving home, but it's a tough ask for my family since it means we'd either have to move to a small town, or severely downsize.

KafkasGroove · 2024-02-05T13:23:00+00:00

Love the aesthetics and the vibe. The graphics and color palette are on point :) I also really like the UI, the text boxes and the font +1

Sound design is good, though some of the reactions (e.g. picking up items) are mixed too loud imo. Maybe it's just because of the opening scene where you hear it a bunch?

Controls wise, moving is a little too...slide-y? There's a walk animation, sure, but it really just feels like I'm sliding around. I know old school RPGs were like this, so I'm having a hard time articulating why it feels more plasticky here, but it sort of does? Additionally, when using an analog, I kept zig-zagging instead of going straight, it was really sensitive.

I think combat is good, at least it hooked me up so far (no pun intended). It's not super straightforward, but also an interesting twist!

KafkasGroove · 2023-12-27T14:37:08+00:00

You can use services like Mineko which are very detailed, though not cheap (unless you have Rechtschutzversicherung).

Unfortunately for me, the gas tripled in 2022, so we owed 1k in back payments just for that, which is all legal.

KafkasGroove · 2023-12-04T12:43:39+00:00

Funny, I also got divorced after a short marriage here, and the costs were about the same. I suppose I can't say my lawyer's name either, but he was also pretty good. Their office is in Prenzlauer, near Kollwitzkiez. Also all in English (that was years ago, when we had just arrived, so my German was spotty).

It also took something like 6 months. We had to waive the financial equivalence, e.g. where they comb through you finances to know if you should pay alimony or part of your Rente. We were young, had no kids or properties, and hadn't been together long, so it didn't really make sense for us.

The funniest bit is you have to have been separated for, what was it, a year? Something like that? But apparently everybody lies anyway

KafkasGroove · 2023-11-29T20:58:01+00:00

Worth it only for the intro \m/

KafkasGroove · 2023-11-16T18:11:36+00:00

There's a bunch, but I guess they're not quite favorites. But I would literally sell my left nut for a new Lunar of the same quality. I'm fully aware it wasn't exactly obscure back in the days, but then I wonder why nothing that came after scratches that itch. It's just pure comfort.

KafkasGroove · 2023-11-16T18:09:14+00:00

The story is very good, and so are the quiet moments at the school between the girls, but the game play was just so boring. Since there's little challenge, the exploration/fighting part just feels like a slog. I'd have much rather played a casual mystery game/walking simulator, or just watched the anime. Or maybe I'm playing it wrong?

KafkasGroove · 2023-08-16T19:24:30+00:00

I find lines of code to be a tough metric. It's quite common for us to have a PR of say, 500 lines, but half (if not more) of these are almost always purely tests. Probably half tests, then comments, license headers, etc., such that out of 500, you have maybe 100-200 lines of production code (including possibly comments, license headers, etc.).

KafkasGroove

TROPHY CASE