Nic Barker
nicbarker.com
Nic Barker
@nicbarker.com
Open source developer & programming educator.

github.com/nicbarker for my projects.

https://www.youtube.com/@nicbarkeragain for programming videos.

ex engineering @canva & game dev @cerebralfix
I have a game side project that uses algebra, so I built a small computer algebra system that can manipulate equations. Would anyone be interested in a video walkthrough of how the code works for something like this? I think it's quite interesting 😁
May 27, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Odd to think that there is now a “vintage” of college degrees that were earned before ChatGPT existed.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if most companies dropped degrees from hiring requirements before the end of the decade if nothing drastic changes.
May 8, 2025 at 1:56 AM
Spend enough years working on an artistic or scientific pursuit and you start to realise that the bell curve meme is actually the sine wave meme
May 7, 2025 at 9:59 AM
Laughed when I saw this man page for the `getdents` syscall on linux:
March 4, 2025 at 6:29 AM
You ever read one of those sentences about a piece of software that immediately strikes fear into your heart?
February 28, 2025 at 12:13 AM
does anyone else's computer desk look like this at basically all times
February 20, 2025 at 7:54 PM
One of Clay's contributors has written a DOS compatible renderer for the Allegro library, and built this awesome replica of Encarta '95 as a showcase. Brings back great memories for me 🥲
February 17, 2025 at 9:40 PM
I couldn't help but laugh out loud when I saw this info box on my stackoverflow profile page. It's perfectly ordered by least useful -> largest to most useful -> smallest.

✅𝑯𝑼𝑮𝑬 𝑻𝑰𝑪𝑲
𝐘𝐨𝐮'𝐯𝐞 𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐧𝐞𝐰 𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐠𝐞!
ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴀɴ ɴᴏᴡ
ˢᵉᵉ ᵛᵒᵗᵉˢ
February 10, 2025 at 9:27 PM
Whenever I have a problem and someone tells me "oh, you can just use the freaky-friday algorithm to do that, here's a link to the research paper"
February 2, 2025 at 1:36 AM
A subtle performance gremlin I've noticed in large codebases comes from abstraction hiding the fact that you're in a hot loop. It's easy for someone to jump in and modify FunctionThatUsedToBeFast here without even realising it's used in a loop:
January 29, 2025 at 11:48 PM
Such a joy stumbling onto a website that looks like this in the modern day!
January 27, 2025 at 8:47 PM
In addition to being one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, the Severance workstations are just stunning, I would kill to have something like this as my daily driver
January 25, 2025 at 9:50 PM
Having a lot of fun writing the script for this new video 😁
January 21, 2025 at 3:23 AM
Getting towards the end of making my "tips for C programming" video, and I wonder how many slides more or less exactly like this one have been made in the last 50 years? 😁
January 15, 2025 at 11:13 PM
Great respect for whichever wikipedia contributor worked on the Virtual Address Space page, some quality ASCII art and step by step walkthroughs in there
January 15, 2025 at 2:32 AM
Thanks to some hard work from contributors, Clay now supports multiple instances, which allows you to render completely separate UI trees in different places in your application. It's also the main prerequisite for threading support, which will arrive soon!
January 10, 2025 at 12:02 AM
I’ve often struggled to put my finger on how Apple changed post Steve Jobs, but this charger they include if you buy a “black” laptop kind of sums it up
January 5, 2025 at 4:07 AM
Badly designed user interface
January 4, 2025 at 1:44 AM
Posting some bait for the graphics programmers / light transport engineers 🟢🟡🔴
January 1, 2025 at 12:41 AM
A little while ago I was interviewing for the first time in a very long time, and this was basically my experience
December 22, 2024 at 9:19 AM
Got the classic "congrats on your traffic, where can we send the bill" email from vercel 😅
December 20, 2024 at 9:05 PM
Google mentions for usage of the word "allocate" perfectly tracks the rise and fall of manual memory management in programming 😅
December 18, 2024 at 10:40 PM
The "intro to Clay" video ended up quite long and was a big effort to edit. Double checking the final render then it's going up!
December 18, 2024 at 1:03 AM
If this isn't some timeline serendipity going on I don't know what is
December 15, 2024 at 10:39 PM
December 12, 2024 at 12:52 AM