So we started a new Unity video game project for mobile in June 2021. Hooray!

Being a mobile project, one of the earliest things we think about is scaling the interface across all sorts of device screen resolutions and aspect ratios, right? Well, to preemptively solve this problem early on, I decided to letterbox the game view - just choose one aspect ratio for the game and pad black bars to the sides of the screen. Simple, solves the game's world space problem without trying too hard, and it automatically adapts to Android's split-screen mode.

I showed the early builds to management as well as game design team and they gave me some general nods. Sounds like green light ahead. I spent the next few months building the game logic and scale the UI around a consistent letterboxed game view. If you had experience scaling Unity UI to a letterboxed area, you should already knew that it takes a whole paradigm of its own that's kinda hard to break out of, but the fact that it stays consistent across all screen aspect ratios is so worth it. Regardless, the biggeer benefit of letterboxing is simpler world space setup. You don't worry about whether this particular area will be overflowed horizontally or vertically in a particular device or not. You have a 9:16 window to view the world through, nothing needs to move at runtime and that's about it.

Fast-forward to early September 2021 and 40+ builds later, the GD started having concern that the playing area is not filling up his phone screen and that the letterboxes are bothering him. He wants to get rid of the letterboxes and wants the game world as well as UI to fill up his screen.

Yes. After 40+ builds, for all of which the letterbox was present, nobody in the project raised a concern about the letterbox. It's only NOW that they all of the sudden side with the GD and demand the removal of the letterbox. I feel like almost half of my effort on this game has been wasted. These clueless guys didn't spend one second looking at the early builds thinking of the possibility that the black bars at the top and bottom of their phone screens (which I repeat: has been around since the very first build) is gonna bother them? Somebody must be playing a cruel joke at this company. They had all the chances to bring this up as a potential issue and TODAY is the first time I hear of it.

See, designers. You waste our time and your time by doing this kind of thing. Please raise your issues early. Complain to us ASAP. If you wait for so long before raising an issue that has been in-your-face the whole time, I can't fault any developer for assuming you're trying to play a long prank. I can tell designers right now: it's not funny.

The "Gratitude" emoji pack recently introduced to Slack. They're basically "Thank you" in different languages.
Among others, there is a Russian "спасибо", but there is no Ukrainian "дякую".

What's up Slack? Didn't you paint your logo blue and yellow when the war started?

If you're gonna push your "please don't cancel us" marketing BS like all the other companies, at least be fucking consistent.

Lua users, have you used moonscript?

It's a little language that has it's own interpreter or can be compiled down to Lua and it's absolutely lovely (currently using it with Love2d).

Of course, as with most things, what I love about it also royally pisses me off sometimes.

For starters local has to be declared for variables, unlike lua.
Otherwise the variable goes to _
Also note, that some tutorials literally tell you the opposite.

all variables are local by default
unless you don't declare them
then they go to _ (throwaway)
Some tutorials get this wrong too.

all variables have to be declared local
except tables. failure to declare a table WITHOUT a local will cause things like
table.insert to fail with "nil" values for no god damn reason.
No tutorial I could find mentioned this.

Did you know we call methods with '\'?
By the way, we call methods with '\'.
Why? Who the fuck knows.
Does make writing web routes more natural though.

Variables in the parameters of new are declared and bound for you. Would have loved to know this before hand instead of trying
to bind to them like a fucking idiot.

Fat arrows are used to pass in self for methods.
Unless you're calling a method. Then you use backwards slash. This fact is unhelpful when you're a beginner and dealing with the differences between the *other* arrow, the backslash, the fat arrow, and the fact that functions can be called with or WITHOUT parenthesis.
And on that note..

While learning all this other shit, don't forget parenthesis are optional!
Except when they're not!
..Like when you have a function call among your arguments and have to disambiguate which args belong to the outer call and to the inner call! Why not just be fucking consistent?

But on the plus size, ":" is now used for what it should have been used for in the fucking beginning: binding values to keys.
And on the downside, it's in a language thats built on top of another language that uses it for fucking *method calls*, a completely
different fucking usage.

And better still, to add to that brainfuckery thats lost in the mental translational noise like static on a fucking dialup modem, you define methods with the fat arrow. Wait, was that the single arrow or fat one? Yeah the fat one. Fuck. But not before you do THIS shit..

someShit: =>

yeah, you STILL include the god damn colon just so when you're coming from lua you can do a mental double take. "Why am I passing self twice? Oh right, because fuck me, I decided to use moonscript." It's consistent on that front but it also pisses me off.

A lot of these are actually quality of life improvements disguised as gotchas, but when you're two beers in to a 30 minute headscratcher it sure doesn't fucking feel like it.

Nevertheless, once I moved beyond the gotchas, it was like night and day. Sure moonscripts takes a giant steaming dump all over the lua output, like a schizophrenic alcoholic athena from the head of zeus, but god damn, when it works it just WORKS.

Locals that act like locals? Check.
Sane OOP? Check.
Classes, constructors, easy access to class methods, iterators? Check, check, check, check, check.

I fucking hate ceremony. Configuration over convention is for cunts. And moonscript goes a long ways toward making lua less cunty.
If you've ever felt this way while using lua, please, give moonscript a try.

You'll regret it, but in a good way!

So I've received a link to Figma for the new mobile app from our designer. It looks great and all but...

Each fucking piece of text is styled independently. Half of the cards in the layout are simple rounded rectangles, the other half are some components with a gradient. Icons are a mix of vector graphics and line elements. Even buttons aren't components. Consistence anyone? Please?

And now comes the best part. How am I even supposed to reach half of the screens? There are four variants of a screen with very similar functionality, but only a single button in the main screen which would at least remotely correspond to one of them. The guy who invented the wirescreens just kept adding things which would be nice to have in the final app, without revising it and making clear use case flows out of it?

After a few days of implementing this clusterfuck of a design, I have finally settled on a consistent set of font and element themes. Just please use components in Figma. You are paid to work in this tool which can make it super easy for the developer AND for you as well to make the design come to life, so why don't you learn to use it?

At least the designer is a nice guy, but god, could he learn to use his single tool?

figured maybe you can specify dependencies specifically to be used in main.rs (as a standalone executable) or lib.rs (as a library)

since for some reason there's dev-dependencies which specifies they will only be used in tests or whatever

well rust actually doesn't compile code that wasn't ever called / would be run (and nags you about code you have but didn't use anywhere). this means binaries are smaller and all that. i've known about this but seemingly the AI insists nobody needs to specify dependency differences between main.rs and lib.rs because of this quirk of rust compiling

ok well then why the hell is there a dev dependencies and a normal dependencies then?

well no good reason.
- "intentionality" -- how about the clarity of intentionality between being an executable or a library?! no? guess not
- build optimization, because traversing usability graphs can be taxing especially in big projects. ok. again still applies to executable vs library problem
- "community and ecosystem practices". really? we've always done it this way? shove it 🙄😩. you try to innovative and then willfully inherit the problems you solved of other languages... because that's how we've always done it. lame

double standards. so annoying

rust can't even do rustfmt properly

it just does things unadvertised

like reorder_impl_lines which is described as putting type and const on top of files adds new lines between fn declarations and that's not disclosed anywhere. ffs took me a while to figure it out

and chain_width should be different for fn calls and match statements. because newlining multiple fn calls makes it readable, but newlining match statements and wrapping them in {} does not / makes it ugly. there is match_arm_blocks but it still newlines random stuff awkwardly, raaghh

I thought hey so cool I can write without caring about formatting and just press Ctrl + shift + i and all done but now I'm arguing with the formatter and the settings available suck and are poorly described. please don't write a formatting documentation with no examples, wtf? And disclose everything it does, preferably with consistent language so I can search the page (some of the descriptions say new line others call a new line a break. thanks)

While developing whatever website that uses Boostrap, my boss always says:
"PLEASE JUST USE BOOTSTRAP CLASSES to make it easier for everyone else to actually operate on that after you're done"

I'm now working on a project started by him and OMG the mess.

The only bootstrap classes he's using are col-* and text-*, the rest is all custom classes like nopad, which is the equivalent of p-0 m-0.

I mean, I might get you use less bytes writing nopad, but be consistent with what you say