A Clean Slate

A once great tool has become a burden. We're moving off of Nx.

I guess I’m helpless, but the word presses uncomfortably against my true emotion. I feel uncomfortable but I can rationalize that I am helpless.

I mentioned a year or so ago that I finished my first game and I wanted to share a bit about the architecture I used to build it. I used Serverless Architecture on AWS using the CDK. I've been using Serverless Architecture for a while now and I really like it.

I thought I was going to be a game developer growing up. It always sounded like the best job. Getting to make amazing worlds and work on different interesting problems every day. Little did I know, I would be 10 years into my career before I would find game development fascinating and find myself jumping in.

Engineering teams are challenged to make decisions that work for them today and will continue to do so years down the road as an application scales. Teams need solutions that are easy to train, powerful to use, and help to directly address core challenges of an application. Choosing an approach for styling our frontends is one such solution and one that can often result in dreaded technical debt without forethought.

I started this year going over my blog again and wondering why I hated it so much. I hated the style. I hated the technology. I hated the editing experience. Hell, I even hated the stinking URLs. This year it bubbled to a head as I took on a new role and wanted a better place to write. Along the way, I discovered some fantastic tools to build a blog and ship a completely new version "the right way (for me, totally up to the discretion of what I value)."

On the whole, getting the Ender 5 up and working was actually a fairly painless experience. The first test print worked about 80% until the base of the sculpture moved off of the surface of the printer. This resulted in the printer spending time printing in the air which just produced a tangle of filament

An excerpt from a conversation about learning Cordova that I thought was helpful to understand it at a high level.

I'm working on an exciting game called Our Story where players collaboratively create narrated stories with GIFs. The game runs in the browser and incorporated AI TTS (Text To Speech) for narrating the stories players create. To ship this game I needed to handle web development complexity and one of the largest hurdles I found was handling audio.

I've spent most of my life wanting to do this. From playing Nintendo games as a kindergardener, to learning to program, to making a startup out of college, I've wanted to pursue this goal someday. Now I've released exactly the kind of game that I wanted to make.

The culture of hierarchy, avoiding disagreements, and making consensual decisions have driven many technology-focused companies to prefer bringing in foreign talent over native Japanese talent.

As a visual learner, I prefer to work with my eyes to see how things work and visualization help me understand complex things... like tests. I’ve been creeping on automated Visual Regression Testing (Visual Testing) for a while now. It visually finds the differences between two different versions of a web app or site.

I've recently been learning React and Redux Sagas for a new project I'm joining. It's been fun transitioning from Angular and learning what project organization looks like without an opinionated framework.

I'm a software developer working at a company that regularly employs developers and technical leaders without a degree in computer science or engineering.

Technical leaders have a challenging job. We look to these leaders to make decisions, mentor developers, lead meetings, and tackle the most difficult problems on our projects. These leaders are often considered the "best" developers and are placed in leadership positions because of consistent performance in the face of challenge. However, while technical leaders have many roles and responsibilities, they also have an arguably more important responsibility to enable those they lead. I'm just not sure we know what that enablement looks like.

Vue is a unique JavaScript framework. It's unique because it can be approached from several different angles and utilized in a large variety of applications. Where other frameworks provide strong opinions, Vue seems to stay flexible.

Web applications have been evolving dramatically in recent years and many techniques have evolved to help our applications run faster, respond quickly, and load easily. With a wide array of modern development techniques it’s easy to overlook all of the options. Server-side Rendering web apps is one such option that has really impressive benefits when implemented in our applications.

Continuing my previous post, we'll be working to setup an event source system using NodeJS. Event source systems utilize a common log of events to manipulate system state in a repeatable and scalable way. By recording state changes in logs, the system doesn't need to rely on a database requests to gather state information. This has a variety of benefits that I've included previously.

I love working on the full stack of technologies involved with developing an application. It's satisfying to design and implement a feature on the backend and request the data from the frontend application to render out something awesome. It's very rewarding but it can be a long process to set everything up. It's often a boilerplate experience and I often find myself doing a lot more devops than development. This got me looking for alternative ways to setup servers and systems that could alleviate this need to iterate on systems rather than programs.

Successful web development requires delivering strong communication between backend servers and frontend applications. The end client of an API needs to easily understand how to utilize the system to develop features and improve the application. REST (REpresentational State Transfer) has historically been used as the paradigm for this communication.

Over the course of the last couple months, I ditched or sold all of my things and moved to Toronto from Boise, Idaho. Visiting and consequently moving to Canada were my first and second times outside of the United States. I left my home to pursue a future with Rangle.

Serverless Architectures are probably the coolest technology I've seen in the last few years. I think that these architectures will make huge strides in scalability, efficiency, and performance of applications.

The JavaScript environment has been changing rapidly in recent years. As new frameworks and technologies draw more developers to JavaScript, those professionals find ways to improve the language. These rapid changes are difficult for browsers and standards to keep up with. This adaption time leads developers to implement language features that can compile back to the core language without having to wait for standards to catch up.

Amazon's AWS S3 (Simple Storage Service) is amazing. With just a few simple steps it's easy to deploy a SSL secured website. This blog is, at the time of this writing, a Hugo static site hosted on S3 and I regularly update the site when I make new content. It's not a terribly long process, but it does take time out of my day when I update my website. Eventually I decided to figure out a way to automate this process using some simple node script or something.

It's been a little while since I've done one of these. Complete Clutter is a collection of links, videos, etc. that I'd like to share. I'd also like to keep them for later and the permanence of a blog post appeals to me.

Migrate to AWS - Make a static website using S3, Cloudfront and Route 53 by Lambros Petrou If you’ve been following this blog closely you’ll…

As a throwback to Michael Kohl @ Citizen428.net, I thought I’d start posting a series of links that were interesting to me every so often…