Cas

Cas
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Nationality:	Argentinean
Location:	Córdoba, Argentina
Born:	14 September 1978
Team:	Slowdrive
First race:	probably, Outrun (WSC)
Championship titles:	none

Argentinian racer. A veteran of the early days of Paleke's WSC, Cas is the developer of Bliss, a full-featured track editor with the explicit goal of supplanting Track Blaster. He is currently part of the Slowdrive team.

Early Stunts

Cas first met Stunts in 1993, when he had his first PC. A friend brought some games to share, including Stunts 1.0. Since then, Cas played Stunts with his friends and built tracks, more focusing on surviving the race than on winning it. Old tracks by Cas feature extremely long, hazardous paths, with confusing splits and cycles.

As an online Stunts racer

Around middle 2005, Cas was part of "La Cueva de Clásicos", a forum that belonged to an abandonware site. The forum was hosting a subforum dedicated to World Stunts Championship, run by Paleke. Cas joined the tournament in the middle of the season and participated actively until some point of 2007.

Cas was aware of other tournaments running at that same time, including ZakStunts and even registered in one or more, but was more comfortable with WSC. His registration in Stunts forum was on 21 November 2005, but did not join ZakStunts until March 2015, according to ZakStunts site, after a long hiatus from online Stunts.

While ZakStunts reports Cas' registration in the tournament as March 2015, when he started posting regularly, Cas remembers having tried an earlier race, but maybe did not post then. However, Paleke appears as to have registered in 2007, yet, in 2005, when Cas registered in the forum, Paleke asked Zak if Cas could join his team Poder Sudaka, suggesting he was already registered in ZakStunts.

In 2016, he organised a one-race event, Race For Immortality, an OWOOT race from which the time estimations were taken for Bliss. The participants would remain forever in the list of famous racers of Bliss. After this race, he hosted his own tournament for a few months, called Race For Kicks.

As a programmer

Since he joined the Stunts online community, Cas has been interested in Stunts internals and wanted to participate somehow in developing for it and analysing the code. He tried to disassemble a part of the game, but other community members have made much better progress with other methods. In early 2010, Cas embarked in a project called Vizcacha, an attempt at verifying noRH replays. Despite some success on the computer he was testing the program on, he failed to make it universal and the project was abandoned later that year.

Cas' most significant software contribution to the Stunts community is Bliss Track Editor, which has become the most commonly used tool for track design in the community, surpassing Track Blaster Pro. Cas has said the project is designed especially for the community and that he has great respect for Track Blaster, whose author also created with the community in mind.

Views

On free software

Cas is a supporter of free software and is more aligned with the views of the FSF than with those of the open source initiative, that is, freedom is a priority over convenience. Still, he is not against non-free software when its purpose is good, like freeware made by independent programmers. Unlike the free software purists, who prefer source code always, Cas defends simplicity and the idea that you should have the 'option' of compiling the source code, but not the 'obligation', so the best form to share a program is binaries with zero dependencies, ready to work, accompanied by the source code, if it's free software.

On styles of software development

Again, simplicity is the key for Cas as regards programming. A program must be made in the simplest way possible, avoiding things that could bloat it or make it slower or dependent on things that are not necessary. Cas avoids object-oriented programming and does not make his software web-based unless the purpose requires so. Independence from Internet is important. He also avoids using third-party libraries for developing. While this can make the process of developing faster, it's only worth it when programming for money, because you need to finish as quickly as possible, but not when you seek reliability and independence.

On privacy

Today's social media push users to give up their privacy and apparently, most are fine with this. Cas refrains from using social networks and programs that violate people's privacy and recommends against their use.

On the world and society

Cas does not normally follow trends or believe blindly in somebody else's speech. Instead, he has been trying to promote independent thinking. Thus, he does not believe in any politician or political party and has a worldwide view without nationalism. He strongly opposes totalitarian regimes that claim to be "patriotic" and does not follow "fashionable causes". He is not a conservative at all, but he believes that if you are not to be called a conservative, then you should have your own personal criterion. In his words: "free thinkers are the ones that 'create' ideas, not the ones that believe in them".