Porting Basketball GM to TypeScript
Jan
20
2020
January 20, 2020
I'm gonna do that thing again where I link to a post on my Basketball GM blog that possbily is of broader interest.
I'm gonna do that thing again where I link to a post on my Basketball GM blog that possbily is of broader interest.
I'm gonna do that thing again where I link to a post on my ZenGM blog that possbily is of broader interest.
Which NBA players take the most shots with their foot on the three point line? If you want the answer to that question, check out the post I wrote on the ZenGM blog.
Why there and not here? I figure, when the hordes of highly interested basketball fans find this spectacular blog post, I'd rather BBGM gets some shine than dumbmatter.com.
Since this is my blog, it makes sense to talk about the greatest technical accomplishment of my life.
...except I already wrote a long blog post about it. Just not here, over on the ZenGM blog.
TLDR: I got an order of magnitude performance improvement out of a mature piece of software, with no negative tradeoffs from an end user perspective.
As you may know, I wrote this cool basketball video game and work as a data scientist. A couple years ago, back in the Hinkie era when the Sixers were a forward-thinking organization, someone in the Sixers front office noticed those two things about me and asked me to apply for a job. It was a somewhat long and unclear process. They didn't seem to know what they were hiring for or what their criteria were (or maybe they did and I was just a bad fit). Regardless, eventually I didn't get the job, but as part of the application I did a mini analysis project, and 2 years out, I figure I might as well share that.
God damn, I've been neglecting this blog. It's sad really, because I do have a lot to say. I guess I've just been talking to myself instead of blogging lately, which maybe says something about my mental stability, but whatever. I'm blogging now, and I'm going to blog the fuck out of this blog.
It's 2016. My job is pretty cool in some ways, but in some other ways it bothers me a great deal. It's probably not in my best interest to go into that in great detail here (as if anyone is reading this, right?) so I will leave the rest unsaid, and just get to the broader point. I am someone who cares a great deal about science, engineering, creating cool things, doing things the right way, etc. And when I say "cares a great deal" I mean probably more than I can adequately articulate with my pedestrian writing skills. It's almost like a spiritual thing. So for someone like me, what do you do when your day job is preventing you from attaining your desired level of spiritual satisfaction?
Side projects!
These are some notes I wrote as porting my on-again off-again hobby project Basketball GM from PyGTK to PyGObject. I did this because PyGTK is dead and stuck on GTK+ 2, and PyGObject is the future and already on GTK+ 3 through the use of GObject introspection. So, others going through the same transition might (or might not) find this useful. You can see the code I'm referring to on the pygobject branch on GitHub.