Ricochet Robots is a puzzle board game for any number of players. While being a very fun game to play with some fascinating properties, it is also interesting to think about writing a program to play the game.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve made e-mail subscriptions available for this blog!

Quite often in online forums, there will be an exchange something like this:

Over time, large systems come to resemble human civilizations that have evolved over centuries or millennia. Cities are built upon the remains of older cities; cultural norms are handed down from generation to generation; revolutions come and go; architectural styles and tastes change; modernization happens.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of speaking at Mountain West Ruby Conference again. I spoke about writing a solver program for the Ricochet Robots board game described in this earlier post.

For my conference talks last year, I used Showoff which I really like. I can edit my slides in Markdown and it is really easy to include source code that is automatically syntax-highlighted.

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be speaking at my first ever RailsConf in April. I’ll be leading a workshop session, Getting a Handle on Legacy Code, where everyone can get hands-on experience working with some legacy code. We’ll put test coverage in place and then use baby-step refactoring to get the code into shape, all without doing a big rewrite.

My family and I enjoy playing board games. In the last few years, we’ve been introduced to several new games that have unique game play aspects.

As I’ve started doing more JavaScript programming, I’ve been looking at different libraries and frameworks for the language.

In my last post I talked about some handy Jasmine matchers. Within hours after publishing that post, I discovered another interesting use for the matchers.