Posts by Allen Cheung
Centuplicate Tetris
M.A.G. was a one-of-a-kind shooter on the PlayStation 3. Where other games were content with 16- or 32-player skirmishes, M.A.G. figured that 256[1] players in the same game would be a massive step up[2]…
Review: Creative Selection
Within two chapters, I realized that I may not be the right audience for Creative Selection. A book written by a software engineer at Apple through its revival of the Mac and introduction of the iPhone, it goes through—in…
Repo Configuration and a Difference of Concerns
In the beginning of the year, there was a strongly-worded technical article about monorepos[1], and why they're worse, in absolute terms, in comparison to using multiple repositories for code (i.e., "polyrepo"). The article certainly…
Seniority, as a Measure to Increasingly Undefined Problems
Recently I've come across a couple of articles that go into what higher levels of software engineers do. Namely, the levels beyond Senior Software Engineer[1]—Staff and eventually Principal Software Engineering positions—are fairly common within engineering…
Review: Hit Refresh
As of this writing, Microsoft is one of the most valuable companies in the world, with a market cap in the $800 billion+ range in early 2019. It's a spectacular reversal of fortunes, when only a couple years…
Review: NieR: Automata: Long Story Short
NieR: Automata was a critically acclaimed action game with heavy RPG and story elements first released in 2017. Its success was quite surprising: it’s a sequel to a series of good-but-not-widely-loved games in NieR and previously Drakengard; the gameplay…
