Similar experience here. I have a few particularly memorable experiences of dealing with the fallout from the September reboots. Although to be truthful this is partly due to the fact we were moving office and I had people jubilantly packing up around me as I worked to keep things afloat.
Not wanting a repeat of this we have migrated as many services we can into autoscaling groups, and automated all resource creation with CloudFormation.
Ah yes I miss Redpower. Was a _very_ polished mod which felt less magic (in a good way) when playing.
About that fourth wall. I know some who take this as a very strange kind of opportunity. For instance:
- SQL databases hooked up to sorting contraptions to manage inventory.
- Arduino/rpi to receive input/output from the game over the HTTP API. Think - controling doors with physical buttons, routing in game player detectors to LEDs. Lots of opportunities here.
Also of note is a mod called Computer Craft, that adds Lua programmable computers and devices into the game (touchscreens, turtles!) as well as a set of APIs for interacting with various aspects of the game.
This would be great. I actually was searching for something like this only a week or so ago.
In my current role I have been doing a lot with Elastic Beanstalk. Many cool features are non obvious and/or not clearly documented. Especially in the case of extending its functionality with various hacks and recipes.
By now I have a fair accumulation of notes on this stuff, would happily pour this into a wiki.
> A lightweight but functional Scala-native IDE with builtin sbt support would be absolutely awesome for a pure-Scala project.
This would indeed be wonderful. I have been using Scala as my first language of choice for some time now and personally feel that Scala is still held back a bit in terms of tooling. Please consider this!
Its very different from DJing. Instead of controlling music with algorithms, you are _create_ music with algorithms on the fly, so to speak.
For example, you might define a sine wave oscillator, and control it with a markov model that holds chains of possible notes. Then you integrate this with other processes and variable and so forth.
If you are interested, check out the Supercollider language, Its great fun!
I went to the algorave in Brighton. Was the recommended field trip for a Generative Creativity modules im taking as part of my degree. In my opinion the spectacle of coding IS as intrinsic to the performance as the musical output is.
I dont think it really does it justice to compare it to more traditional DJing/controllerism. Generally the kind of music from livecoding is qualitatively pretty different.
This work is really aesthetically pleasing. Nice one!
Programmatic art generally falls under the domain of generative creativity. A field that draws inspiration from topics as varied as biology and architecture.
I would recommend 'Generative Design'. http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/ (There is an English edition)
A really beautifully designed book. Great to leaf through for inspiration, but also has decent example code for a variety of techniques.