As mentioned previously, I recently built a simple online game while learning the Elixir/Phoenix web stack. This post describes what I built and how. This was a fun learning experience for me and hopefully useful for you too. The finished project is here: https://github.com/maciejgryka/secretwords Requirements So first, what are we bui...

Over the past months’ evenings and weekends I’ve been having fun building side projects. I’ve been fascinated by the Elixir ecosystem and wanted to learn more about it. As is common during the pandemic I really wanted to play some board games with friends online. As is common among parents, I almost never have reliable, uninterrupted t...

A while ago the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, gave some kind of recognition to Robert Lewandowski, who seems to play football well. I don’t follow these things closely, but that’s not the point. The event caused a bunch of commotion, for a few reasons. Mainly, the current Polish government, including the president, is pretty terrible...

When working with TailiwindCSS, be careful to not generate CSS classes dynamically - if you do, some of your CSS classes might be missing in production as explained in the docs. The reason for this is Tailwind using PurgeCSS to delete unused classes and PurgeCSS being intentionally naive about how it detects which classes are used. For...

Should we strive towards wild & unrestricted capitalism, or planned economy? Of course, when you put it like that, it's obvious the answer is "neither". Without getting into whether any of the extremes is worse than the other, it's clear that neither is optimal. Over centuries and decades we've arrived at various places on that spectru...

Small break from writing for me today, but you should read this https://zeynep.substack.com/p/is-choice-always-worth-the-anxiety

There's a long history of people believing they are better humans when they are rational. It's a dangerous path to go down, however, because in practice it often leaves important data out of the equation. Most obviously, human emotions are often discarded as if they don't exist. If you have a choice to make and you're weighing pros and...

If you think of yourself as a sphere, with different densities on the inside and the outside, how are you built? Are you hard on the outside and soft inside, or do you have a squishy outside and a hard core? If you have a hard shell, many things bounce right off of you. It's not easy to affect you. Your shell protects you from many thi...

The last year has been an interesting way to uncover patterns in our collective thinking. One thing I noticed is that it's difficult for societies to think probabilistically. "Masks don't work" vs. "it's OK, I'm standing 2 meters away" are both symptoms of that. It seems obvious that both wearing a mask and keeping your distance is a w...

If you see yourself as a rational person, you probably try to retrospect occasionally and evaluate whether what you’re doing is right. This is difficult for many reasons, among those what is “right”? Also, how do you avoid your own biases and look at things as they are, rather than making yourself feel good (or bad) unfairly? The same ...