Cocos2d by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli considered this as the basis for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, but ultimately decided it was a bit too messy. Nice overall though.
RPG Maker by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The one true game engine!
Video 1.
Reviewing a Bunch of RPG Maker Games by Majuular (2022)
Source.
Google Maps by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Owned/developed by Google as of 2020.
Early on jumpstarted from several acquisitions, notably Keyhole Inc. and Where 2 Technologies.
Google Street View by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Street View's go into the past mode is the dream of every archaeologist. Ciro can only dream of a magic street view that allows going back to earlier centuries and beyond... isn't it amazing to think that people in the future will have that ability to time travel back to around the year 2006? Ciro wonders how long Google will be able to keep storing data like that.
Thanks, CIA.
Ordnance Survey by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Has some of the best map data available for the United Kingdom, but their data appears to be proprietary?
IDEs are absolutely essential for developing complex software.
The funny thing is that you don't notice this until someone shows it to you. But once you see it, there is not turning back, just like Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote.
Unfortunately, after the Fall of Eclipse (archive), the IDE landscape in 2019 is horrible and split between:
  • highly buggy but still feature rich Eclipse
  • many may many other feature lacking options using possibly more trendy and forward lasting implementations like Electron
  • awesome cross-platform proprietary JetBrains IDEs
  • the God-like Windows-only proprietary language-lacking Visual Studio
Programmers of the world: unite! Focus on one IDE, and make it work for all languages and all build systems. Give it all the features that Eclipse has, but none of the bugginess. Work with top project to make sure the IDE works for all top projects.
Projects of the world: support one IDE, with in-tree configuration. Complex integration is often required between the IDE and the build system, and successful projects must to that once for all developers. Either do this, or watch you complex project wither away.
Build tool maintainers: make it possible for IDEs to support your tool! E.g., implement JSON Compilation Database output so that IDEs can read the exact compiler commands from that, in order to automatically determine how files should be parsed! Or better, just use libllvm in your IDE itself as the main parser.
Ciro is evaluating some IDEs at: github.com/cirosantilli/ide-test-projects
Monaco (editor) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
However also at the same time very limited integration with vscode, that makes using it for VScode compatibility almost useless, e.g.:
Vim by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Before we get a decent open source integrated development environment, what else can you do?
But also perfect for small one-off files when you don't have the patience to setup said IDE.
vim's defaults are atrocious for the 21st century! Vundle is reasonable as an ad-hoc package manager, but it can't set fixed versions of packages:

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact