Rob Janssen (RobIII)

Reinforcement learning part 1: Q-learning and exploration

We’ve been running a reading group on Reinforcement Learning (RL) in my lab the last couple of months, and recently we’ve been looking at a very entertaining simulation for testing RL strategies, ye’ old cat vs mouse paradigm.

Why I (still) write code

For nearly two decades, I’ve been writing some form of code. But, the primary reason I code has changed over time. In the beginning, I wrote code simply to make something real.

Pulley Logic Gates

The essence of digital computing is the use of continuous physical states to represent a discrete number of symbols and the ability to perform logic based on those symbols. Although electronic circuits are exceptionally well-suited for this, any system that can handle symbols as both input and outpu

Watch Paint Dry: How I got a game on the Steam Store without anyone from Valve ever looking at it.

If you were on the Steam homepage on Sunday night, you might have noticed a somewhat interesting new title available: “Watch paint dry”.

10 Easy Steps to a Complete Understanding of SQL

Too many programmers think SQL is a bit of a beast. It is one of the few declarative languages out there, and as such, behaves in an entirely different way from imperative, object-oriented, or even functional languages (although, some say that SQL is also somewhat functional).

Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe

Connor Krukosky is an 18 year old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe...an IBM z890. This is his story. Connor's presentation 'I just Bought an IBM z890 - Now What?' - was featured at SHARE in San Antonio in March, 2016. For more

Semantic Versioning

Versioning your software is very important. Most people, and by people I mean engineers, assume they know how versioning works and in a lot of cases they are correct. However, it can't hurt to deep dive into how it works and why it works when it's done right.

HTTP/HTTPS not working inside your VM? Wait for it.

Have you ever run into a problem, done some troubleshooting, but decided it only affected yourself, and shelved it for a while? I did that a couple of a months ago with a particular problem which forced its way back into my life this morning.

Magical ORM's

Just like many things nowadays you have to ask yourself a question. Should I use some nice library or roll my own? I hate to date myself, but a lot of nice tools have come up in web development in the past decade which makes this much harder to decide. I prefer to roll my own simple solution.

Once Again on TCP vs UDP

[[About Vol.2 of the upcoming “Development and Deployment of MMOG” book. There is no need to worry, I just need some time to prepare for publishing of Vol.1. “beta” chapters of Vol.2 are planned to start appearing next week. Stay tuned!]]