Hi, I'm Oliver.

Coffee enthusiast with a love for all things tech. Tech enthusiast with a love for all things coffee. Studying for my Bachelor's in Computer Science at USW.

How does this blog work?

I've often spoken to people about the inner workings of this blog, teasing elements and snippets to those who ask, but I've yet to actually go into detail about how everything comes together to present the very page you're seeing right now, or the post…

Monday, 04 November 2024 · 13 min · Oliver

How (and why) I'm rewriting Unity documentation

Taking a stab at redesigning something that is long overdue.

Wednesday, 10 May 2023 · 6 min · Oliver

Shorter code ≠ better code

There's an interesting post about how clever code is bad. It outlines some bad practices, and some good ones to use in their stead, such as the snippet:

// bad
while (*d++ = *s++);

// good
strcpy(destination, source);

But I'm here to hammer that point home and show to you that shorter code can, and often does, perform a lot worse than a readable alternative.

Wednesday, 11 May 2022 · 4 min · Oliver

Designing a modular Discord bot framework

Update 8 August 2023

While I am extremely proud of this solution, I ultimately decided against it and settled on separating the bots as containerised services. Nevertheless, the solution here is still valid and useful for a variety of situations, and so I'm leaving this post up in the hopes that you or someone you know will find it useful.

For the better part of the past month or so, I've been rewriting the bot(s) which power the official Brackeys Community Discord server. This post isn't so much a guide, as it is a vent. A window into my process of dealing with the ever-growing enterprise-level codebase I've signed myself up for, and the hurdles I've faced. Enjoy.

Thursday, 07 April 2022 · 10 min · Oliver

State machines, a state of mind

Guest Post

This post was written by a guest contributor. As such, the advice presented here may or may not conflict with advice I've given in other posts, nor may it reflect my own personal opinions on the subject at hand.

Hello, You can call me Jade! I'm a programmer/game developer and I primarily work in the Unity game engine. I love state machines and I've made more than my fair share of them. In fact I'm relatively well known at this point for turning just about everything into a state machine!

In this guide I'm going to be teaching you about the basics of State Machines and how to get started with them!

Welcome to a madman's guide on the basics of State Machines.

Monday, 28 March 2022 · 19 min · Jade