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Neil Meyer's user avatar
Neil Meyer's user avatar
Neil Meyer's user avatar
Neil Meyer
  • Member for 12 years, 4 months
  • Last seen this week

About

I made my own Web Assembly based arcade website. I recently had some downtime and decided to experiment with WebAssembly. I built a custom Single Page Application (SPA) using vanilla JavaScript and compiled several C-based games using Emscripten and Raylib. To house them, I designed a retro-inspired landing page with a neon aesthetic.

I’m particularly impressed by the efficiency of the tech stack—the Raylib binaries compile to roughly 170KB. I'm quite proud of the physics implementation in these games! My long-term goal is to monetize the project with Google Ads once the site is fully indexed. The whole project is 3.8 megabytes big. Find it here

A few software engineering truths I hold to.

  • An open-source project has achieved true success when all users are equally unhappy.

That belongs right on a wall alongside "The Mythical Man-Month" and "Murphy’s Law." It’s the open-source version of Pareto Efficiency, but fueled by GitHub Issues and spite.

  • Every new feature is just a future bug report in a trench coat.

Today’s "innovative solution" is tomorrow’s "legacy code" that someone else has to deconstruct at 3:00 AM.

  • Early adopters are often just early complainers.

The Lifecycle of the "Early Complainer"

  1. The Arrival: They download the alpha version of your project within 4 minutes of the first commit.
  2. The Usage: They don't actually use the software for its intended purpose; they use it to find out where it breaks.
  3. The Feedback: Within the hour, they’ve opened a GitHub Issue that reads: "Great project! However, it doesn't support my hyper-specific edge case involving a 2004 Blackberry browser. Literally unusable."
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