Code of Honor

Well I'm so glad my AI agent has a sense-of-irony detector: I should not have run a rm -rf of a path adjacent to the thing under test, and the irony of doing so while fixing a rm -rf data-loss bug is not lost on me.

SWAPMEAT is a roguelite third-person shooter, where every alien you harvest gives you new body parts with unique powers, like triple-jump legs, turret-dropping torsos, grenade-launching turkey heads.

2005: "Git is just a directed acyclic graph." - Linus Torvalds 2009: "Git is just a content-addressable filesystem." - Scott Chacon 2011: "Git is just homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space." - Chi Wai Lau 2026: "Git is a just a…

I'm not worried about AI taking my job.

Occasionally I get the urge to write blog articles.

Mike McQuaid is the project leader for Homebrew, the package manager for macOS all developers use.

Every day I'm surprised by how capable AI agents are becoming.

Sandvault, a macOS sandbox for AI agents, now supports browser automation, letting you safely interact with web pages: https://github.com/webcoyote/sandvault

I make online games and discovered they're a magnet for hackers, and get attacked in proportion to their success.

How do you ensure success when collaborating with AI agents?

If everything worked correctly, my blog articles are now syndicated to Mastadon/Bluesky/X, with reverse syndication links in the comments.

So many folks have reached out to me to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the launch of Guild Wars on April 28, 2005, that it encouraged me to write this little bitty.

Credit where credit is due I feel fortunate to have been part of Blizzard Entertainment when it started, now over thirty years ago.

In 2015 I participated in HandmadeCon, a convention created and run by programming guru Casey Muratori about game development.

I'm Patrick Wyatt, a lifelong game developer, designer, and player.

Developing games is a full-time occupation, so it is no surprise that I’ve had less time for blogging as I’ve started creating a new game.

Anyone who runs a web site knows that they’re constantly under attack.

Game-unit path-finding is something that most players never notice until it doesn’t work quite right, and then that minor issue becomes a rage-inducing, end-of-the-world problem.

At a certain point in every programmer’s career we each find a bug that seems impossible because the code is right, dammit!

The first-ever multiplayer game of Warcraft was a crushing victory, an abject defeat, and a tie, all at once.

In my previous article about StarCraft I talked about why we rebooted the project and changed it from a follow-on to Warcraft — derisively called “Orcs in space” in 1996 — into the award-winning game that we were finally able to deliver after two more yea…

In this post I’m going to talk about linked lists, a seemingly trivial subject that many programmers — even good ones — seem to get terribly wrong!

I've been writing about the early development of Warcraft, but a recent blog post I read prompted me to start scribbling furiously, and the result is this three-part, twenty-plus page article about the development of StarCraft, along with my thoughts about

In my previous article about Warcraft I talked about the beginnings of a series that would come to define Blizzard Entertainment and lead it to being one of the best-known and most-loved game companies in the world.

So you've written an awesome online game that works perfectly in the test environment, but when real users are playing the game server doesn’t work properly.

A number of readers asked questions about programming careers, both about getting into game-development as well as staying employed in software engineering.

Back before the dawn of time, which is to say when PC games were written for the DOS operating system, I got to work on a game called Warcraft.

TL;DR: Server-side game recording is awesome for performing scalability testing, as well as reproducing game bugs and enabling players to replay their game experiences.

One of the biggest hassles in programming is handling error conditions.

TL;DR: Solved – after several failed attempts I discovered how to detect client disconnects when using named pipes in C# — the article below includes relevant code from my CSNamedPipes GitHub project.

Before Instagram was a billion dollar company, Mike Krieger posted a presentation called Secrets to Lightning Fast Mobile Design about how his team made the Instagram photo-sharing application feel so responsive, which is one of the key reasons their comp…

I spoke this year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2012) on “Writing Server and Network Code for Your Online Game”.

Writing installers for applications requires a substantial effort, even when using tools like InstallShield.

One of the problems I’ve experienced using third-party DLLs is the way that they handle new and delete for C++ classes, which can lead to memory leaks or even memory corruption.

I develop and publish multiplayer games for a living, and have discovered some useful solutions for running reliable online services.

A common pattern to manage SQL stored procedures is to drop the current procedure and recreate it.