Varun Ramesh's Blog

In this post, I describe how parser combinators can be used to parse recursive languages, as well as deal with operator precedence and associativity.

This post introduces parser combinators, a technique for building complex parsers through the composition of simple components.

ChatGPT is really good at roleplaying as strange and unusual characters with minimal prompting.

Simple tips for beginners to level up their Python skills (with interactive code snippets).

A postmortem for Thermomorph, an Alien-inspired horror game.

This is a postmortem for Proctor, the first of three horror games that I recently released.

Use HTML5 video tags instead of animated GIFs.

Integrating garbage collection into a C application was almost too easy.

Many languages distinguish between primitives on the stack and objects on the heap. Others only have objects, and thus require primitives to aways be boxed. It turns out you can get the best of both worlds.

As an experiment, I decided to allow all push notifications for a week.

Editing gameplay videos in Premiere requires that you re-encode, thus losing quality. Instead, you can use FFmpeg to edit losslessly.

My recent game projects have used a GameObject architecture that unifies Component-based GameObjects and Mixin-based inheritance.

Lua is an awesome language, but it has some annoying features that have caused endless frustration for me.

This post describes a method for creating animations in games programmatically, while still retaining composability.

Some typecheckers understand dynamic type tests, thus avoiding downcasting.

Coroutines can either be stackless or stackful. The terminology is somewhat confusing.

A write-up for my CS 148 ray tracing image.

When writing object-oriented code, you frequently want a constructor that takes in values and assigns them to object fields. Some languages reduce the repetition required for this.

I made a mobile runner game for the CS194 class at Stanford.

When creating a static site, you can pull a page's modified date directly from git.

Last weekend, I participated in Ludum Dare, a game jam where you make a game from scratch in under 48 hours.

The other day, I accidentally printed a ton of binary data to my terminal. Upon doing so, my computer started to beep incessantly.

A snippet for a reloading server in bash.

A couple weeks ago, I took part in a game jam on itch.io called the AGDG Microgame Jam.

WebGL games can use HTML/CSS for GUIs. It's a lot easier to use than most game engine UI frameworks.

I write about some recent hackathon projects I worked on.

Every year, my high school holds a canoe race, where students from the Engineering, Physics, and Calculus classes compete to design, build and race a Canoe over the span of two weeks.