There’s an anecdote that stands out in the world of software development, one that echoes the differences between incremental progress and transformative leaps. It’s a race: one participant walks, another takes a train, and the third, a plane. Their progress is a lesson in perspective.

This is an interview for my mobile game Laser Dreams. I originally did it for the Cocos2d-x blog, an open-source mobile game engine. You can find the original blog post here.

One late night I opened up my trusty MacBook Pro only to find it turned off. “That’s odd, I never turn it off. Must have ran out of battery or something”. Without a further thought, I pressed the power button and the computer promptly started booting up. Since I had an SSD, this process would only take a few moments… but not this time. This time it got stuck in the “gray screen with slightly darker gray Apple logo phase”.

I recently had to setup my machine for Python development from scratch. I had a couple of bookmarks of guides that run you through the process, but I soon found out they were pretty outdated. My co-founders blog post was a good start, but I wanted to improve it a bit. So here goes.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on a project that makes heavy use of Canvas for drawing and manipulating huge amounts of objects (the project is currently in open beta and can be found on www.fanpictor.com). Being my first time using the technology, and not knowing much about it, I had to overcome issues that in retrospect seem pretty obvious. Here is a list of things I learned or wish I knew before starting.