Hi! This is a little microproject I want to do: I want to compress my years of experience building the API backend of a top-50 Steam game into a bunch of weird, rambling advice that I can deliver with all of the authority of someone who can’t differentiate success due to merit from success due to luck.
This is a time-lapse of me very quickly demonstrating the entire, end-to-end process, by putting together an 18-card expansion deck in just under 3 hours.
2024 EDIT: I built this game in 2022, before cheap, low-effort, and morally questionable AI art generation tools became broadly available to all of humanity. I did it using python scripts and legitimate, public data-sets of verifiable provenance, and put a lot of additional effort into the output and layout of the cards - and I’ve made the output available for free. Please do not come at me with “AI is prima facie immoral” unless you’re willing to engage with this project on these terms.
This is an early build of a game engine was working on in 2020, designed to produce a procgen roguelike world.
If you watch how badly the chess games go you can see that the distributed gameplay logic engine didn’t work so good. Distributed consistency is really hard you guys.
Bureaucracy is the worst. Learn about some of it.
I build a new auth system about once a year.
That’s a weird hobby, but, it’s, like, incidental to the actual hobby: I start a lot of projects using new technologies, and the first thing I have to figure out in these new technologies is always auth.
And every time I do, after I’ve got most of auth working, I have to figure out why my test suite takes 500+ms to run per test, despite my using an all-local stack of generally pretty performant technologies - in fact, a lot of the time it feels like the more modern and performant my stack is, the slower all of these tests are.
So, sometimes, in FooApplication, we need to extract some Nurble Data from the HTTP request, which is included as a base-64-encoded JSON blob in a cookie from the Nurble provider.
So, I decided, “how hard would it be to build my own CAPTCHA?”, but instead of showing people boring trains and crosswalks, I could generate the dumbest possible categories of things.
edit: I feel the need to point out that this is, in fact, a comedy article about technology and not a serious take on programming.
I’m really enjoying learning about Elixir, and Phoenix. They constitute, in my opinion, an extremely thoughtfully designed language and framework. So far my biggest gripe about the language is that prominent library developers keep choosing names for their products and libraries that are not terribly Google-able. “Phoenix”? “Hex”? “Cowboy”?
Anyways, Phoenix got really popular in 2017, at which point it seemingly dropped off of the face of the planet.
I want to put that wholly at the feet of their pursuit of Phoenix LiveView, a stack so fundamentally cursed that it undoes almost every iota of goodwill earned from Phoenix or Elixir.