Codex

Interesting, I’d tend to demote the initialism, ie topSecretFbiFiles.tar.gz

Lol, this is how I’ll eventually open source my game: completely new repo with one fresh checkin. No one will ever see how many curse words and diary-entry commit messages litter my fossil repo.

I really enjoyed this game back when, and replayed it a couple of years ago. Very unique RTS mechanics and engine, I’m excited to see this open sourced!

Perimeter had several weird gimmicks. Bases must be built on terrain that has been flattened with a terriforming tool (voxel/heighmap manipulation of the landscape is part of the game.) The titular permiter is an energy shield that you can put up around your entire base. There’s also only 3 basic units, but units can be fused together (and separated back out) to make more advanced units on the fly.

The terraforming-as-war approach is neat and I’ve always been surprised that more games don’t try to incorporate similar mechanics. The multi-units are interesting but to me suffer a similar issue as games with many guns but only one kind of ammo. By the time you’ve decided to switch tactics, you might already be too low on basic units of one type to change into what you need.

Picturing a wimpy sad hand labeled “The Klan” which has been left eternally hanging.

But then I decided, I wrote my own solution, a thing of 1,600 lines of code, which is, yeah, it’s like thousands of times less than the competition.

And it works. It’s very popular. … I got 100 emails from people saying that it’s so nice that someone wrote a small piece of software that is robust, does not have dependencies, you know how it works.

But the depressing thing is, some of the security people in the field, they thought it was a lovely challenge to audit my 1,600 lines of code. And they were very welcome to do that, of course. And they found three major vulnerabilities in there.

He makes a ton of excellent points, but the succinct impact of this little example really hit for me. As someone who often rewrites things so that I can both understand and fully trust in what I’m depending on, it’s always good to be reminded that you literally can’t write 500 lines of code without a good chance of introducing a major vulnerability.

The tech stack is so dizzyingly high today, and with so many interlocking parts, it continually amazes me that anything at all functions even in the absence of hostile actors.