Believe it or not - I used to be full of optimism. I grew up in Plymouth, UK (the original one) - and it’s a very slow town. There isn’t a huge amount going on down there - the counties of Devon and Cornwall are, in England, often the places people go to retire. The average salary is £39.8k ($51.5k USD) - which was much less in around 2010 when I was sitting in my mom’s garden debating what I wanted to do with my life at age 20. I had a pretty misspent youth, but I loved computers - and I loved videogames. I’d even worked at one of the only web design agencies in the southwest of England - as an apprentice - for a huge £2/hour (£80/week).

I wanted to build a fun little project. That project was spacetime.

I actually built most of it over a couple days, and over the decades I’ve gotten pretty good at spinning up full-stack web apps from idea to deployment quickly. This time, I wanted a mostly SPA experience, but I’d use Supabase on the backend to try and escape as much API code as I could. I ended up wanting to call OpenAI to generate embeddings, and the Supabase Edge Functions DX with Deno was really frustrating.

2023

Every year at some point I like to give my website a little revamp. It’s usually around January when I’m full of motivation and creativity - and I tell myself I’ll actually commit to writing more often. Writing really helps me solidify my thoughts and learning, so it’s usually a well-intentioned spur of motiviation. Inevitably - as the year goes on and as work and family life gets in the way, this goal often gets side-tracked.

Some background

I recently migrated my personal website from WordPress to Zola, a Rust-powered static site generator. I’ve used static site generators in past versions of this site - but opted for WordPress in the 2020-2021 version because static sites do come with some extra manual work no matter how you cut it. WordPress with its online admin interface abstracts a lot of that away - and it’s genuinely a pleasurable experience to actually write and publish.

It’s been a while since I last wrote anything about game development. I often think about writing something new I’ve learned or an idea I had along the way - but never do.

I do however think there is value in writing - even if I’m writing into the void. Writing thoughts down is a good way of solidifying thoughts. You can be retrospective and even learn something new along the way. I’m going to try to post more regularly - even if the only goal is to see my progress over time in my constant game experimentation.