Game Review: ATOM RPG

I saw this game on Steam the day before it was officially released and it immediately caught my attention. The trailer videos gave me the clear impression that ATOM RPG is an indie clone of the first 2 games in the Fallout series but what seemed odd is the fact that the authors didn’t try to conceal that fact and they even mocked a few of the Fallout cliches in those videos.

Book Review: Phishing for Phools

I added this book to my reading list after I finished another book by Robert Shiller: ‘Irrational Exuberance’, which is full of entertaining stories that help readers to understand many concepts of behavioral economics. I expected a similar experience from reading ‘Phishing for Phools’ and I wasn’t disappointed. Profit Seeking and Morality The core idea of this book is that humans are not 100% rational and everyone has weak spots that can be exploited by people who seek profit with no regard for the suffering that may be caused by operating such a business.

Book Review: Stand Firm: Resisting The Self-Improvement Craze

This book has a provocative title, probably that’s why it grabbed my attention and I decided to buy it to see what does the author actually mean by “Self-Improvement Craze”. I mean, who doesn’t want to improve himself? It turns out that this book has nothing against self improvement per se.

Kotlin 1.3 Features: Contracts

The Kotlin compiler is pretty smart when it comes to static analysis but there are still cases when the code looks perfectly obvious to a programmer but it’s very difficult to understand for the compiler. Contracts were introduced in Kotlin 1.3 and their sole purpose is to improve the static analysis by letting programmers provide an additional information on what to expect from each particular function.

Plotting Financial Data With Python: Efficient Frontier (N assets)

We already have the efficient frontier script that we created in the previous post but it has one major limitation: it does not allow us to plot more than 2 assets. Plotting 2 assets is enough to see diversification in action but it’s not practical to have a portfolio that consists of 2 assets.

Plotting Financial Data With Python: Efficient Frontier (2 assets)

The main idea behind the Efficient Frontier is that the overall risk (volatility) of a portfolio may not be equal to the sum of the risk of its components so some combinations are better than others. In this post we’re going to visualize the optimal weights of 2 given assets in a hypothetical portfolio.

Smartphone Lifespan and Pricing

As an Android developer, I’ve been passionate about smartphones for quite a while. It always seemed to me that I should update my smartphone every year or two in order to get all of the exciting new features that were constantly added to the mobile platforms via the hardware upgrades and software enchantments but it seems like those old rules do not apply anymore.

Crypto Currencies as an Asset Class

Bitcoin, the world’s first crypto currency, had it’s 10th anniversary just a few days ago. It’s price has risen from nearly zero to a whooping $20,000 per “coin”, although it went down from those all time highs and now it’s trading for about $6,500. As anyone would expect, such a phenomenon cannot avoid generating a lot of drama and controversy.

Kotlin Game Development: Finalizing The Game

This is the last part of the “Kotlin Game Development” series and we are going to add the “game over” scene to our snake game and also reflect on the whole process. It might be helpful to read the previous posts first in order to understand what’s going on.

Kotlin Game Development: Game Scene

Now that we have all of the required components we can start working on the actual game mechanics. In this post we’re going to create the GameScene class, the main scene where most of the action happens. This is the eighth part of the “Kotlin Game Development” series and it’s better if you read it in chronological order: