A bit late to the party, but hey, it’s May! And just like the previous month flew by, I have no idea what actually happened besides the fact that the total and utter chaos at work combined with the naughty pranks of our toddler-to-be completely drained my batteries. I have to adm … | Continue reading
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Jeremy Jung of the Software Engineering Radio podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #614, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Jeremy summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneve … | Continue reading
Time for another design mistake, this time from our new Internet Service Provider (ISP). We switched last week because I required a business subscription as part of the cost-optimization plan. In Belgium, there’s very little choice when it comes to ISPs, with two giants completel … | Continue reading
It took a very long time to finally add a new entry in the personal phone history matrix, and I’m quite proud of that. My last smartphone, a hand-me-down Sony XZ1 Compact, was eventually rooted and flashed with LineageOS, significantly prolonging its lifespan. In fact, the phone … | Continue reading
My Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) system has hit a new wall since I started taking notes on my work laptop in a new Obsidian Vault. How do you sync notes across devices? The Obsidian Help page doesn’t beat around the bush: either use Obsidian Sync—their proprietary add-on th … | Continue reading
Or should that be invasiveness? Persuasiveness? It’s no longer a distraction, it’s an addiction, it’s everywhere, and its aggressive promotion and passive acceptance is driving me crazy. I’m walking around on campus where students don’t look up while walking but down—desperately … | Continue reading
I’ve been known to (re)play old games—sometimes in new engines, sometimes on original hardware. The latest games to fit that bill are Duke Nukem 1 + 2 as part of the Duke Nukem Evercade Collection 1 where an amazing feat was pulled off by completely rewriting the engine to suppor … | Continue reading
What happened in March? Can you believe that my head feels like the Belgian weather of late: damp and very cloudy? I tried keeping my head above water in the complete chaos at work. I gave more talks about my creativity research. Kev and I exchanged lots of friendly emails as par … | Continue reading
Electrical baby toys are interesting to disassemble and look at how it’s made. Not up to the point of screwing out the PCB, decapping the chips and trying to reverse-engineer the ROM—I’m sure that’s interesting too—but just on a basic mechanical level. Companies like VTech and Cl … | Continue reading
In the programming language Go, it’s very easy to build something using high-level concurrent patterns thanks to the concept of Goroutines and channels used to signal between them. A Goroutine is essentially a coroutine that maps onto green threads that map onto real native threa … | Continue reading
The nameservers of brainbaking.com have changed, from Cloudflare back to my trusty local hosting/domain provider. Since the DDoS attack of last year, I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare to more resiliently catch dumb fuckups of people with questionable ethical motivations, as Cl … | Continue reading
We’re out of olive oil. Again. I don’t know why, but these dark green glass bottles always seem to be empty earlier than expected. My friend Luk over at Pensive Ibex buys his in the form of a big 5 l barrel directly through the farmer, and he claims that’s enough for about a year … | Continue reading
The site stats tell me that my about page at /about is consistently one of the most visited pages on this website. That confirms what everyone already knows: people are very curious, sometimes even nosy. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m just as nosy as my visitors: I love clic … | Continue reading
It’s been three years since the first desk setup post from 2021, and while a couple of things have changed, nothing major has. The preservationist in me wanted to post an update nonetheless, so here goes. The Desk The desk setup: an overview. The room is still small, th … | Continue reading
I came across a weird function in our Go codebase the other day. It was supposed to do just one thing but accidentally did a bit more—you know how this goes. Suppose you’re validating some business rule and need to fetch a bit of data to do so: func (s *Service) IsPeriodInvoicabl … | Continue reading
My first month back in the software engineering industry as an independent software architect is behind me. I’m still adjusting to the big change of pace. The paper work involved to set up a company (besloten venootschap or bv) in Belgium took longer than I anticipated and there’ … | Continue reading
Ana Rodrigues too deleted her Spotify account, citing numerous valid reasons (see my You Shouldn’t Listen To Spotify post), of which one in particular stood out for me: Spotify is bad for the environment. She cites Natalia Waniczek’s FFConf 2022 talk where Natalia presented painf … | Continue reading
I’ve openly proclaimed my dislike for current trends in AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) before: it’s being misused to genereate crap to put on the internet and the availability of hallucinated crap makes students’ learning painfully worse. So I’ve been wondering: can these Ch … | Continue reading
In retrospect of several creative endeavors, on average, I feel like I spend 25% of my time creating, and 75% hustling. I don’t think that’s a healthy balance at all: it should be 60%+ creating and 40% or less hustling. Yet in this world where uninterrupted yelling is the norm to … | Continue reading
Board gaming is such a lovely hobby to keep your mind and your company on edge. No bright blue screen or need for electricity only adds to that experience. But board games also allow you to give in to that creative urge: instead of playing with the flimsy cardboard components, wh … | Continue reading
A few months ago, I was interviewed by Henry Suryawirawan of the Tech Lead Journal podcast about my book The Creative Programmer. The episode, #161, was published yesterday, so be sure to give it a listen! Here’s how Henry summarized our hour-long conversation: Wouter Groeneveld … | Continue reading
The first month of the new year came and went, and with it, surprise flurries of snow, episodes of frozen slippery fun, and sudden peaks in temperature once more confusing our shrubberies that are budding way to soon. It was my last month at the university (see why I am leaving a … | Continue reading
As an electrical and mechanical engineer, my late father-in-law was an expert in crafting home-grown black boxes that meticulously—and sometimes also miraculously—executed certain tasks in and around the house, such as automatically opening and closing the curtains based on the p … | Continue reading
Thanks to the multi billion dollar advertisement industry, searching for something on the internet has devolved from a joyous Altavista guess-the-keywords activity to a tiring chore where one has to wade through endless pools of generated SEO-optimized crap, hollow company blogs … | Continue reading
My mother-in-law bought a new laptop that came pre-installed with Windows 11. I thought that was a good idea since we were looking for an easy-to-use operating system. I was wrong. This post is a reminder to myself that, next time someone needs to be introduced to the world of di … | Continue reading
First, I really wanted to leave. Afterwards, I didn’t want to. Then, I was paralyzed and didn’t know which route to take. Now, I’m just glad a decision has finally been made, and I can move on. After five and a half years, I am leaving academia. In this post, I scramble to gather … | Continue reading
We’ve been keeping track of our household expenses on and off over the past decade—more off than on as it’s yet another huge chore to pour everything in tables and extract useful information out of it. At first, we scribbled everything in a big expenses notebook, but after a year … | Continue reading
In one of the buildings at our university campus, a big TV screen next to the staircase tried (in vain) to educate students on how to correctly send emails by listing dos and dont’s. The funny examples convinced me to stop and read what was being displayed, for the first time in … | Continue reading
A few months ago, Laurens, a colleague from another department, successfully defended his PhD thesis titled Machine Learning for Network Intrusion Detection on FPGA. Laurens is a hardware engineer and spent the last four years finding ways to speed up network intrusion detection … | Continue reading
Sometimes, the things that I write about are part of a series. For instance, the game Wario Land II is part of the Mario/Wario Land series, of which I’ve played and reviewed several. Yet, until now, I didn’t really link to the other games in the series, even though that has been … | Continue reading
Happy New Year! Hopefully 2024 will bring the needed peace and solace to everyone. 2023 was a very difficult year for us, with lots of what you might call “low lows” and a few “high highs”. We usually make fun of that saying, but this seems like the first time it’s appropriate to … | Continue reading
Here’s my 2023 In Books end-of-year list, published on the cusp of the end of something old and the beginning of something new. Despite having much less time to sit down and read this year because of birth of our daughter, I still managed to finish 22 books in 2023. That’s 2 book … | Continue reading
My email pen pal Jw over at https://so1o.xyz/ asked me how I record screenshots for my vintage gaming reviews that get published on Jefklak’s Codex. That’s a good question that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with myself, depending on the system. I’ve already briefly touched on … | Continue reading
Justin Searls over at Test Double gave a talk at RailsConf 2019 that really struck a chord here. I already briefly mentioned the talk at the beginning of December but I feel that it’s worth repeating here. Justin’s summary perfectly sets the scene: This presentation is an explora … | Continue reading
I gave up after yesterday’s quirky A* assignment. Advent of Code is an Advent calendar for programmers containing daily puzzle challenges in two parts. It was fun while it lasted, but my tight time constraints just can’t deal with the increasing challenge as the calendar draws ne … | Continue reading
It’s that time of the year—the time to publish the yearly notes summarizing playtime statistics and providing a personal opinion on recent and vintage Game Of The Year (GOTY) contestants. In 2022, TOEM and Shredder’s Revenge were examples of superb recent games, while Axiom Verge … | Continue reading
Yesterday, the video game DOOM turned thirty. On 10 December 1993, John Carmack, John Romero, Sandy Petersen, and the rest of the id Software crew completely changed the world by releasing the most violent and satisfying DOS shooter ever created. Hundreds of so-called “DOOM clone … | Continue reading
December marks the beginning of the countdown to Christmas, traditionally via Advent calendars. For us programmer nerds, a special one exists called Advent of Code where each December day before Christmas we’re treated with a challenging programming puzzle. This year a good frien … | Continue reading
After Inktober and November’s National Novel Writing Month, this time it’s DOSember, a month long of DOS game streaming on the Twitch community! Screw the classic holiday fanfare, let’s have a wonderful DOSember instead. I haven’t participated in the DOS Game Club’s monthly sessi … | Continue reading
As I once again find myself staring at local software dev job ads, I can’t help but wonder: what are the current trends in local software dev ads? In other words, can we identify patterns by data mining job ads? The answer is, of course, yes, but the results are disappointingly c … | Continue reading
Almost every few weeks, a new and exciting retro hardware project is announced. These are truly great times for retro computing enthusiasts. How come these hobby projects explore in popularity lately, besides the obvious growth in demand and the availability of crowdfunding platf … | Continue reading
The articles here at Brain Baking end with a footer that contains the author bio and ways to contact me, including my preferred channel, email. Instead of including a simple link, however, the email link, when clicked on, is being replaced by the actual email address with the he … | Continue reading
Four Podcasts is my upper limit—that’s the remark of a friend while discussing the overabundance of podcasts in the last few years. I was curious how friends managed to listen to so many of them. I’m a Patreon supporter of Retronauts that puts out lengthy new episodes weekly, and … | Continue reading
Everyone’s doing these app defaults lists lately. Since they’re lists and I happen to like lists, I guess I’ll chime in, even though I don’t think these blog posts add much value for others. Instead, they could be interesting to look back to for myself in a far future? Here goes. … | Continue reading
Something scary dawned to me recently after having peeked into several source code repositories of funded projects here in academia. Most of these repositories contain code that would instantly make my software developers ex-colleagues sick—and by sick, I mean suddenly-needing-a- … | Continue reading
I’ve had an interesting conversation with Mr Creosote at Mastodon a few months ago that lingered in the cavernous debts of my subconsciousness until another related thought dragged it back up. Mr Creosote is the founder of The Good Old Days, a befriended retro game review website … | Continue reading
It’s spooky season! Wait, no, again. Spooky season is over! Or are we still in it? For just this week you say? I never really understood the Halloween craze and dismissed it as yet another Americanized craze that made its way to Europe, but after participating in a ghost hunt for … | Continue reading
For decades, I’ve been trained to optimize my thinking in terms of numbers. I’ve been pushed to be more productive, and enjoyed being more productive, which in turn led to searchers how to be even more productive. I’ve accomplished things and felt good about it, motivating myself … | Continue reading