yumaikas @yumaikas@mastodon.social

Digging into learning the Phoenix Web framework. Step 1 is figuring out how to use my own CSS for things.

And there are _way_ more secrets than I think I'll be able to find.

Standout levels: Escher Labs, The Granary, Ghost Town, Sawdust and The City of Shadows.

Some of my least favorite include The Cutty Mine and Blood and Bone, either for being too dark, or too red. They aren't bad, though.

There are some _striking_ visual moments in the game, like the Infernal Machine's grinder, or when you first see the Iron Cathedral. Or the mindscrew sections of Escher Labs, or how strangely isolated Neobabel is. Like, it's just floating in a pocket dimension.

So, I've been playing Dusk, and the game just doesn't ever stop being good.

Granted, there are parts of Episode 2 that get a bit monochromatic for my tastes (especially Blood and Bone), and there are flashlight sections that get a bit drawn out. But the combat stays engaging, you have a varied set of weapons that stay relevant, the atmosphere is awesome, and the environmental story telling manages to be unsettling in an unashamed action game.

So, working on a spreadsheet engine, and it's the first time I've gone: "Hang on, how can I prevent duplication of data on a massive scale"?

Not that it's a real concern yet, but it's funny that I almost never think about this normally.

My wife painted some super cute sketchbook covers!

And, I am reminded again why there are *soooo* many libraries making it so that you don't have to write raw DOM code in JS. Nothing is nearly as straightforward as, say, LinqPad or C#, or TCL. Especially event handling.

So, "The Toolbox Fallacy" is a *very* well written video on getting started on those dreams you have, and not letting fear hold you back
https://youtu.be/sz4YqwH_6D0

Looking further, it looks like Jester is maintained by one of the core nim developers, which is nice.

Now, there are *some* things I'm currently a little less than jazzed about when it comes to Jester, the currently leading web framework for Nim:

The docs are *not* great right now. I plan on trying to help with that, as I get a better handle on Jester, but it's also not clear how much the current maintainers want to keep it up and running? At least, they haven't responded to Nim going 1.0 in their README file on github.

The other nice thing about nim is that it's super easy to write files for little scripty things, and then they can become executables quite quickly.

At least, Nim, as I get used to some of it's quirks, seems to be more fun to write than Go. Granted, I'm probably handling errors less correctly than I would in Go. But, not having to think about them all the time is a nice break.

And, for some reason, following the compiler errors is easier than in Go or Erlang

And, for side projects where I have limited time, Erlang and Go's runtimes don't seem quite so compelling held up against their verbosity.

Nim doesn't have a hugely multithreaded server with a trie-based router that runs at super high speed as of yet.

But it *can*. And I could be part of getting it there. Not tonight, of course.

I'm hoping that the end result of porting this over still stands up to reddit/hn well, but that's never been a thing I've actually had to stand up to.

Why Erlang? Because I've wanted to learn it in the past, in part because of it's well known runtime. Why Nim? Because webapps aren't Erlang's strong suit. It *can* do them, but there's a lot more ceremony vs Go, and Nim is more concise in the small than Go is.

Currently working on porting kbwiki from Erlang to nim. What's kbwiki, you ask? It's what powers https://idea.junglecoder.com and https://drift.junglecoder.com

It's a ball of Erlang I threw together in a frenzy, and while it's served it's purpose well, I'm ready to move to something a bit easier to edit and grow.

Screencap of WIP:

https://junglecoder.com/linx/d2pmo8an.png

But, for better metaprogramming, better C interop, and (hopefully) having to write less code on balance? I'm willing to get used to a different namespacing aesthetic to get there.

Go is nice, and has some great libraries, but I'm ready to try something else.