Hi, I'm Oliver.

Coffee enthusiast with a love for all things tech. Tech enthusiast with a love for all things coffee. Failing my Bachelor's in Computer Science at USW.

Closer

Dear friend

So I had my assessment the other day. The one I had long been awaiting, for 6 months, and for the first time in a long time - I have some good news to share.

Shorter code ≠ better code

There's an interesting post about how clever code is bad. It outlines some bad practices, and some good ones to use in their stead, such as the snippet:

// bad
while (*d++ = *s++);

// good
strcpy(destination, source);

But I'm here to hammer that point home and show to you that shorter code can, and often does, perform a lot worse than a readable alternative.

What you've done for me

Dear friend

Remember how I said I wanted to stop using this blog as a place to spew out my raw thought processes?

Why?

Dear friend

I was an inquisitive child. So much so that I had a unique ability to drive my parents particularly insane. I remember once asking why it is that - during summer - the sun seems to set 2 or 3 hours later, despite the clocks only going forward 1 hour. I would then proceed to ask “why” for every answer they gave me.

This would go on for hours.

Designing a modular Discord bot framework

Update 8 August 2023

While I am extremely proud of this solution, I ultimately decided against it and settled on separating the bots as containerised services. Nevertheless, the solution here is still valid and useful for a variety of situations, and so I'm leaving this post up in the hopes that you or someone you know will find it useful.

For the better part of the past month or so, I've been rewriting the bot(s) which power the official Brackeys Community Discord server. This post isn't so much a guide, as it is a vent. A window into my process of dealing with the ever-growing enterprise-level codebase I've signed myself up for, and the hurdles I've faced. Enjoy.