It’s a bit warm like

The sun has been out in full force this week and as a result England has officially melted. The person formally known as Allan, is now indeed just a puddle of sweat typing in a chair. As a result, this blog post is going to be very short, low brain effort.

Code Stuff:

A lot of my day job time over the past months has been spent building internal CMS systems for projects. That’s nothing new for me - It’s actually fairly enjoyable. I enjoy building bespoke software when it’s appropriate and scope creep doesn’t rear it’s ugly head.

We investigated a few solutions - but ultimately the problem we were trying to solve was a very specific one. The CMS was easy to build - allowed incremental fast progression rather than ‘I need to learn how to do X,Y,Z before we can progress’ and allows us to expand upon the core bases in a more natural way. I think there was real concern that existing solutions ( no matter how wide spread ) would end up fighting against the tools meant to help you when it comes to implementing features only OUR cms system needs. For example, if we needed to do some extreme nesting component and pass data to an api before generating the layout yadda yadda. With our simple in house tool, there are no existing barriers we need to work around or ‘hack’ to get working - we can just build it.

In other news I’ve spent a fair amount of my free time investigating more niche open source tools and software - specifically I was interested in older video games being remade with modern tools and or ported into the browser. An example being Open Red Alert was a great evening of ‘oh wow, that’s how that worked’. They made an open source engine for the classic C&C game - allowing them to add multitudes of new features/improvements.

I think the interest in this kind of thing stems from the old adage that “Every software developer, is just a failed games developer” - in reality I think I’ve just found a nice enjoyment in downloading these repos and learning how things work. It’s like taking apart things as a kid and putting them back together. Sure you might not ever make your own radio - but isn’t it nice to see how it works?

I also updated this Hexo site a little bit, we now use the tag functionality, and I’ve added in a stupidly simple about page too. Still enjoying hexo, writing posts in markdown is just… more productive? I don’t need a WYSIWYG editor for these stupid posts and I’d argue most people don’t for their ‘professional’ blogs.

Life

Had some great memories with friendly recently, not limited to getting absolutely destroyed at bowling, being subjected to far too many beers during world cup matches and a few nice excusions to record shops a bit further a field. I’ve also gotten back into the habbit of browsing the Sunday market on the Newcastle Quayside - there’s a chap who sells records down there and I ‘reward’ myself with a nice drink in a beer garden where I can read a book for an hour or two ( I’m reading some of the ‘American greats’ at the moment, if you cared ). Sunday evenings tend to be reserved for listening to a record on the sofa. I’m slowly learning to spend less time glued to computers ( productive or not ).

I recut the mowhawk a month(?) ago and I’ve felt all the better for doing so. I’ve had mowhawks on and off ( mostly on, I think? ) since the age of 16. I’ve tried to explain it to friends in person many times but it sounds odd - I just feel myself. It’s not an act of rebellion or a statement that I think punk music is making a comeback, it just makes me feel good, that’s got to mean I’m doing the right thing. Besides with the way my hair’s going, I’ve no idea how many more years I can pull of ANY hairstyle, so might as well go out with some style.

Other stuff

I recently watched Andor and absolutely loved it, by far the best thing to happen to star wars since Disney bought the franchise. Yes, there are things I could cry about if I wanted to be a super pretentious person - but I thought it was incredible. It was shot well, acted amazingly, the story was engaging and it made Rouge one ( an already great film ) even better. If you’ve been putting it off like me because you were burned out on Star Wars, watched it, thank me later.

I’ve been playing the amazing Open Front - It’s an open source browser game where you basically try and take over a pixel world map. It’s all the best parts of the classic Paradox style ‘colour in the map’ kind of game, with less of the slow, time consuming gameplay. Last weekend I spent far too long playing it - and already have a PR ( though it needs to go through their suggestions process first ) to implement a small QOL update. It was really eyeopening to me to see how complete the game feels, how seamless it all is - on the web. This kind of performance and ‘mainstream’ appeal of a web game is something I could only dream about ten years ago - the team should be really proud of what they’ve built.

Music I’m loving at the moment:

  • Nick Drake
  • Angels and Airwaves
  • Blink 182
  • Prof
  • Low Roar

Films / TV I’ve recently watched

  • Andor and the Star Wars films
  • The Avatar netflix live action ( first season was alright )
  • Rewatching ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ and crying again
  • Suits
  • Bob’s burgers

Keep on Keepin’ on
– Allan