Ancient Web: Sean Barrett Kept Three Decades of Programming Notes on Nothings

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Sean Barrett's homepage is a strange combination of programmer's desk drawer, game-design notebook, and library of things he wrote because he wanted to see whether he could.

Visit nothings.org.

Barrett introduces himself as a programmer and lays out an extensive index. It includes downloadable C libraries, technical articles about data structures and graphics, early games and interactive fiction, film and music projects, mathematical amusements, and fiction written under deliberate constraints.

One 1998 article studies why iterating a collection of simulated game objects can go wrong when objects delete one another. At first he presents loops that any C programmer would recognize. Then he changes the assumptions: what happens when the next object disappears, or removing one item moves another into an array slot the loop already passed?

The answer takes many pages of examples, rather than a reassuring one-line rule. For anyone building game systems, the problem feels remarkably current.

Other linked writing includes 1998 regular-expression searching, 1999 Minesweeper tactics, a 2000 note on OpenGL fog, and 2001 game reviews. That chronology shows the site as a place for publishing work in progress long before code hosting became the expected destination for every programmer's experiments.

The homepage is an index of experiments

Barrett's homepage links code that he explicitly offers to the public domain: image loading, TrueType font rasterization, Ogg Vorbis decoding, stretchy buffers, and other utilities. It also links essays explaining rendering methods and software interfaces, including a technical examination of Thief: The Dark Project.

The surrounding nontechnical material refuses to follow a brand strategy. There are 1991 and 1993 writing experiments, a novel drafted in 2002, game-related jokes, and an interactive-fiction section. The website serves as a personal filing cabinet rather than a feed demanding constant attention.

Its contents have been updated over many years, so it is not a frozen 1990s snapshot. Instead, it preserves old work within a long-lived structure, with dates that let visitors distinguish early notes from later reflections.

That is the real historical value of nothings.org: source code and technical arguments are kept close to the writing habits and curiosities of the person who made them. A useful algorithm can survive without its authorial context; here, the context is still linked from the front page.

Follow Barrett's original programming and writing index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.