Author Archives: kchodorow

If you have a 2D game with a board and you want to center it on the screen, here’s the best way I came up with to do it. Suppose you have a variable-size board (could longer or shorter in either dimension) on a variable-sized screen (could be a phone, tablet, web browser, console, etc.).Continue reading “Centering a stupid box in Unity”

Over the holidays I’ve been playing with game development in Unity, so I’m going to post a couple of things I’ve discovered that I think are handy. First up: setting a random seed for your game. Not exactly a groundbreaking discovery, but I implemented this early on and it’s game-changing (har har). I added aContinue reading “Setting a random seed for Unity”

I recently signed up for yCombinator’s cofounder matching platform. After a week, I deactivated my profile with over 100 founders (or potential founders) having reached out to me. That seemed like a lot of responses, which might be because I had fairly flexible requirements: open to someone technical or non-technical, geography didn’t matter, and aContinue reading “Co-founder analysis”

A lot of projects require scraping websites. I usually write a scraper, run it, it fetches all of the data, and then fails in some final step before writing it anywhere. Then I curse a bit and try to fix my program without being sure what the responses actually looked like. Then I rerun myContinue reading “Scraping politely”

Yesterday, Andrew and I started working on a driveway for the undeveloped parcel of thorny, swampy woodland we bought during lockdown. We rented a chainsaw at an equipment rental place, where the guy asked if we had ever used one before. We had not. He showed us how to start it: open the choke, pullContinue reading “Road to Thornmire”

Every year, I go to GenCon: a gaming conference where tens of thousands of nerds descend on Indianapolis to try out new board games, RPGs, and other assorted nerdery. Indianapolis is no stranger to huge conferences, but GenCon stretches the city to its limits. GenCon buys thousands of hotel rooms throughout the city and thenContinue reading “Optimizing resource allocation”

Altair is a beautiful graphing library for Python. I’ve been using it a lot recently, but it was a real struggle to get started with. Here’s the guide I wish I’d had. I’m going to be using https://colab.research.google.com/, but this should work fine in any other interactive notebook you want to use. Getting started First,Continue reading “Intro to Altair”

At this point, I’ve fallen so far behind of where JS developers are that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to figure out what’s going on. However, Vercel is a portfolio company of GV’s, so I decided to give it a valiant effort. Thus, I started at vercel.com. I went through their deploy flowContinue reading “Adventures in modern web programming”

There is something delightful about LaTeX. However, the last time I bothered with it was in college, since I don’t have much call for PDFs in day-to-day life. I recently came across Overleaf, which is an online LaTeX editor. The nice part is that it live-renders your work and you can right-click->Save as an PNG.Continue reading “Hassle-free LaTeX with Overleaf”

Sorry to keep posting financial stuff, but whatever, it’s my blog. It’s interesting how the amount of investment risk that a human can put up with is very relevant to how much they have invested, and it isn’t linear. Let’s take the case of three investors, all of whom currently can invest $1k/month and needContinue reading “Risking it all”