our notebook

I recently had the opportunity to attend and speak at SCaLE 15x in Pasadena, and it was an awesome experience. Read on for an overview of all the great talks I got a chance to see!

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Welcome to the latest blog post in our interview series. We’d like to introduce you to our programmer, Toby Deshane.

Name, Company, Title, City

I’m Toby Deshane and I work for Infinity Interactive as a Programmer. I live in Middletown, CT.

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Welcome to the latest blog post in our interview series. We’d like to introduce you to our resident Californian and front-end programmer extraordinaire, Will Hutchinson (aka Hutch).

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Infinity's own Paul Zolnierczyk attended (and presented at) MKE DOT NET, a one-day development conference in the Milwaukee area. MKE DOT NET brings together .NET developers from the Midwest to explore new ideas, code, share knowledge and discover best practices. Here’s his recap.

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Some of the folks here at Infinity Interactive are avid players of fantasy sports, and this year, they convinced me to join their Fantasy Football league. Two months into the season, what started as a casual game has turned into a trip through a data analytics wonderland as well as what will hopefully be a recurring series of posts here looking at various aspects of the data analysis that I've been doing.

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Welcome to the 10th blog post in our interview series. Let’s pause to mark this occasion and fire up the confetti cannon. We hope you’ve enjoyed getting to know our crew. And, while those colorful tiny pieces of paper fill the backdrop, let me introduce you to our own Tracey Shirley.

Meet Tracey. She is compassionate, kind, clear, logical, efficient, and analytic. She keeps projects on track and uncovers software bugs in a way that leaves us all inspired. I know I want to be like her. Read her answers to my questions.

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I'm still playing around with Redux and, as usual, I'm always on the lookout for ways to optimize my laziness.

One thing that I found irks me just a little bit are the Redux actions. They are nothing but raw Javascript objects, meaning they are very easy to set up and manipulate. But since anything goes, they are also very easy to subtly get wrong. For example, I'm working on a spaceship game and I have an action called MOVE_SHIP. But what arguments was I using for that? Was it this:

{ type: 'MOVE_SHIP', ship: 'enkidu' }

or rather, that:

{ type: 'MOVE_SHIP', ship_id: 'enkidu' }

Sometimes, I remember to double check myself, but other times, I'll use the wrong property and set myself up for a long, protracted, somewhat less-than-joyful debugging session.

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YAPC::EU is Europe's premier event for the Perl programming language. This year the conference was held in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, from August 24 through August 28. Infinity sent one of our developers, Sweth Chandramouli, to attend, and we asked him to give a quick recap of his experiences there.

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YAPC::EU recently hosted their annual Perl Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, and Infinity Interactive is proud to have partnered with them in releasing the YAPC::EU mobile application on iOS and Android. Today, we’ll cover some of the technical challenges we faced in creating this app, which we built on the foundation of the Open Source project that provided a similar app for Xamarin Evolve 2016.

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Redux is a small JavaScript library that is quite popular at the moment. Liberally inspired by functional programming principles, it offers a state container that is accessed and modified via message passing.

Thanks to this message passing, and a strong emphasis on immutability and pure functions, it minimizes surprises and maximizes sanity. One of its beautiful promises, for example, is that since the state is only modified via messages (or actions) and pure functions, one can consistently replay the actions of an application and end up in exactly the same final state.

As I was reading and playing with Redux, I began to wonder... This is a blissfully small library. How easy would it be to port it to Perl? In the name of science, I had to try.

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