Ten Years of No-blogging

   Ten years ago on this day I launched this personal website which is definitely not a blog. It was just a side project to learn LINQ and the new features of ASP.NET 3.5. Who would have thought it would last for 10 years? My noobier self was quite proud of what I had written and of course with time I became ashamed. Right now I'd rather rewrite the project than develop new functionality on top of the current codebase and no, that has nothing to do with it being Web Forms.

   I learned a lot of things from this project. Although after learning LINQ I did not meet any programming challenges it turns out a real-world project has a lot of requirements one normally does not think of. A favorite example is avoiding double post when the user has just posted a comment and presses F5. A real world project has a lot of small issues like this one that tend to be overlooked when learning. When I built this project I was already working as a professional programmer but I still had people to look after me and tell me about all the small things I had missed. Being forced to think of them myself taught me what managing a software project felt like. I fought spam and had to implement ways to block it quickly. I had to change the defaults of some features because they turned out to be terrible user experience for the main user - myself. In addition I implemented some "clever" solutions for simple things just to learn why they are not that clever and why big boys do it differently.

   Here are some stats:

   Total Posts: 268 (about 1 article every 2 weeks on average)
   Posts in Bulgarian: 127
   Posts in English: 141
   Posts about music: 71
   Posts about programming: 64
   Posts about games: 36
   Posts about technology: 41
   Comments: 1645
Posted by:   Stilgar
00:05 03.02.2018

Surface Book 2

Surface Book 2
   I was a good boy in 2017 so Santa brought me a Surface Book 2 machine. After spending a week with it I am writing down my impressions. Right off the bat I would like to point out that I firmly believe this is the best machine in its class. I am noting this because I will mostly focus on the negative sides in this review. You can assume that anything I did not mention is perfect and best in class. Readers should also keep in mind that their use case matters. If you are an iOS developer the MacBook is a better choice and the Surface Book is borderline useless. I also do not know what will happen in the future. If it turns out that six months from now all Surface Book 2 machines out there fail it will make them a bad choice but there is no way to know that yet. To be honest it seems that Apple has the best historic track record with reliability over time not only compared to Microsoft but also compared to all PC manufacturers. With these issues out of the way let's see what the Surface Book 2 has to offer...
Posted by:   Stilgar
16:00 30.12.2017

StarCraft 2 Political Compass

StarCraft 2 Political Compass
   Here is something that I wanted to do for a long time - StarCraft political compass...
Posted by:   Stilgar
17:36 11.10.2017

The ThrowIf* Method Pattern

The ThrowIf* Method Pattern
   There is a simple pattern that is extremely effective and increases source code readability with practically no downsides. Sadly this pattern is underused and many developers do not even think about it. I am talking of course the ThrowIf methods used to throw exceptions when validating state and arguments.
Posted by:   Stilgar
22:59 13.08.2017

Dreamhack Valencia 2017

Dreamhack Valencia 2017
   Last week I went to Dreamhack Valencia. I took part in this event once in 2014. You can read about it here - Dreamhack Valencia 2014. My impressions did not differ significantly. I am a bit sad that WCS does not allow Koreans to compete for points in foreign tournaments but otherwise the event was pretty much as exciting as the previous one. Yes, I did play and lost 0-2 to Mana and 0-2 to RiSky.

Here are the pictures...
Posted by:   Stilgar
00:01 19.07.2017
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