Dave Saunders

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

Back to blogging

https://t.co/sT94q0j9zW

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

@EarlOfTwirl I saw this on HackerNews and thought you'd like it

https://t.co/HH03Xoi50G

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

@EarlOfTwirl What are the cool kids in tech using now? I looked at Bluesky but it seems pretty empty.

I want the good old days of totally pointless arguments about TDD etc., without all the depression, end-of-the-world scaremongering, and Trump memes 😒

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

Opening Twitter/X after a year off. My feed is:

45% "AGI is imminent and will kill us all"
45% "AI is over-hyped, AGI is decades away"
10% spam posts generated by the very AI that may or may not kill us all

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

btw, this is why I love side-projects.

I've spent days nerding out on something totally pointless like rendering grass, but as a result have learnt so much about things like algorithms for compacting an array in parallel, or how GPUs work.

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

This is a fun little experiment in writing custom shaders... rendering 200,000 individual blades of grass on the GPU in Unity.

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

First optimisation, frustum culling.

This only draws the blades of grass the camera can actually see.

That gets us to about 40fps zoomed in, but doesn't help when we're zoomed out and can see everything, so there's more to do.

[Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub @allenholub]

That's actually what the Scrum Guide says, for what that's worth 😄. I, on the other hand, would just eliminate Sprints altogether and have teams work as a team on one story at a time. Problem solved! Scrum solves no known problem that I can see.

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

I probably would have got further with this, if I hadn't spent ages trying to beat my own score on this level instead🤦

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

Working on a prototype of a sort of coding kata site.

The idea will be to have challenges to complete, and then try and optimise the code to beat everybody else's score.

This is a prototype of the tutorial
https://t.co/3o7SCQ28QE

[Gal Shir @galshirart]

Can I suggest this little change?

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

The shader is super simple, it takes the height of each vertex, clamps it between a configurable minimum value and 1, and uses it as the alpha/opacity value.. so, things lower down have a lower opacity

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

Since I have some time on my hands for a side-project, it seems like a good time to play with Unity a bit more!

Working on a little town builder 'game'/experiment to learn more about working in 3D.

[Dave Saunders @DaveJSaunders]

That's better, the grid fades out towards the bottom, which makes it slightly easier to read as being 3D and not just a mess of lines