Stephan Sokolow (He/Him)

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Ontario, Canada

Stephan has an interest in software freedom, human-computer interaction, user interface/experience design, programming, and Linux... but he prefers to leave graphic design to the experts.

Open Minded Author

Authored Content

How university open debates and discussions introduced me to open source

Open source for MBAs: A primer

If you’re neither a scientist, nor active in the open source community, it can be difficult to properly understand why people write open source software. Why would people just…

Authored Comments

ssokolow
8 open source video games to play

Here are some of my favourites:

1. OpenTTD (see also Simutrans)
2. Endless Sky (Escape Velocity clone)
3. Minetest (Minecraft clone)
4. Frozen Bubble (Puzzle Bobble clone)
5. I Have No Tomatoes (Bomberman-like game with a catchy BGM track and tongue-in-cheek powerups)
6. Fish Fillets (Formerly commercial puzzle game that got open-sourced)
7. Hex-a-hop
8. Mirror Magic
9. Rocks 'n' Diamonds
10. PySolFC (1000+ solitaire games, including ones requiring special decks)
11. Widelands (The Settlers 2 clone)

ssokolow
What is duck typing in Python?

I've been programming in Python for just shy of 20 years, and the main thing I've noticed is that EAFP makes it very easy to wind up with very cryptic error messages if you're not careful.

urwid (The TUI framework for Python) suffers heavily from that.

(If you don't feed it what it expects when building your widget tree, you'll get a horrendously cryptic error about missing attributes/methods somewhere deep within urwid.)