#tech dev

[nanowrimo]

A Fond Farewell to NaNoWriMo Technical Director Dave Beck

We’ve got some truly bittersweet news: after almost 10 years as NaNoWriMo’s Technical Director, Dave Beck is moving on. Dave joined NaNoWriMo in 2014 and since then has overseen all things site and tech-related for NaNoWriMo and Young Writers Program. In addition to his considerable technical skills, Dave is a true Renaissance man with a remarkable range of skills, interests, and hobbies. Thanks to Dave and our other long-time Software Developer, Jezra Lickter, both our websites are currently in very stable places for this transition. 

Before we say goodbye, Dave shares some thoughts about his time at NaNo:

Q: What are some of your proudest achievements at NaNoWriMo?

I’d say it’s the redevelopment of the Young Writers Program website, which started in 2015. The first version of the website didn’t have many participants. I worked with Marya and Chris [Angotti] for the redesign. However, the biggest risk was creating a writing space for the kids. This feature did not exist before, so we built it from scratch. When we first launched it, 40% of the kids were writing on the site. The number is still going up. It’s 84% at the moment. I didn’t expect it to be this successful. Last time I looked, 20 billion words were written! The second achievement: we haven’t lost a single word ever since the writing space was created. It was very important to me that we did not lose any of the kids’ novels. 

In general, the YWP site was the most fun.

Q: What are some of your fondest NaNoWriMo memories?

The design is the best part. Not the coding itself, but deciding what things we should do and how to get there. When you figure out a design and then develop it, it’s very satisfying when it works well.

It’s also fun being able to creatively collaborate with people, especially with the YWP. I’ll miss Marya and Jezra a great deal, it was very productive.

Q: Tell us about one of your NaNoWriMo novels.

I’ve never won NaNoWriMo! Not even close to it. The closest I’ve gotten is 5k. It was a nonfiction book about ADHD. The funny thing is, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t want to write books! I just wanted to be F. Scott Fitzgerald and go to cocktail parties. I do NaNo every year though. It helps me understand the website and see if everything is working as it should be. So instead of writing, I see the problems and go and fix them.

Q: Fun fact about you that people might not know?

I’m a veteran career changer. I’m leaving programming and coding to become a winemaker. Before this, I was an attorney. I’m still a member of the California Bar actually. I was also a reporter for the LA Press, a fancy sous chef in Boston, and an exhibit designer at the San Francisco science museum.

If you can’t tell, I have ADHD. I liked this job the most since it’s so complicated being a full stack developer. It works well with ADHD because I’m constantly switching what I’m doing.

Q: Are coding and noveling at all the same?? Inquiring minds want to know.

A little bit? There is an element to understanding narrative within a code. You want to understand the order and how the code does certain things. It’s kind of like plotting a novel.

Designing code is also a creative process. But the coding itself shouldn’t be, which is the biggest difference. Coding is standardized so it won’t cause problems, especially when multiple people are working on the code.

With novel writing, you can do whatever you want. You can even break rules to prove a point. You don’t want to do that with coding or you break the whole thing!

Q: What will you miss/not miss the most at NaNo?

I’ll miss the creative relationships I had with Marya and Jezra. It’s interesting and fun work. NaNoWriMo also had a lot of creative lunches before COVID. Once, we all created our own cocktails!

I won’t miss how sometimes, it feels like I’m reinventing the same wheel over and over. For example, we’re trying to refine the system that makes challenges for existing novels. It’s still not completely working right in the way we want it to be, so we end up spending a lot of time on it. It’s like Sisyphus. You think you’ve finally completed something and then we’re back at the bottom of the hill.

Q: Any advice for a developer working at NaNoWriMo, or any aspiring tech developers?

Learn all seven parts of full stack developing as fast as possible. You will need it. Rely heavily on Jezra too. He knows a lot.

For aspiring tech developers, you should only spend 10% of your time actually coding. The other 90% of your time should be spent planning, scoping, and user testing. One of my issues is jumping into a code without a plan, which leads into problems I could have avoided. You should plan for things ahead of time. It’s like scoping your whole novel before writing words down. I’m a pantser coder which isn’t necessarily the best thing.

Q: Since you’re so fond of the YWP site, how about advice for any young writers?

Think for yourselves and write what you want to write. If it’s what you’re interested in, you’ll have fun.

Interested in learning more about open positions at NaNoWriMo? Sign up here to be notified of job postings. Just as we celebrate the diversity of our creative community, we want our staff to reflect that same spirit of inclusion, and we will encourage candidates of all races, genders, cultures, class and educational backgrounds, abilities, and orientations to apply.

#nanowrimo #writing #coding #tech dev #interview #by nano hq #dave beck

[vynnyal]

OK, fair warning to the few people I actually managed to convince to try the game??

Rain world does NOT play like hollow knight, and you'll get your butt kicked if you approach it like that.

It's really hard. Like, really hard. Instead of the game literally giving you abilities in the form of power-ups and damage buffs, the only abilities you gain is from what you learn and your own ingenuity. You're a rat from beginning to end. If you just beef your way through it, it's gonna suck and you're gonna be confused and frustrated all the time. But if you pay attention, take it slow, and learn how the ai works and how everything interacts with each other, you can consistently get through and dominate situations you thought were impossible to do so when you first began. Now get out there, kill some lizards, and bully some old computers!

#blabbing.txt #rainworld #rain world #art #rivulet #hunter #spoilers #not really lol #Other notes that I left out because I wanted it short and sweet: #There is movement tech out the ears in this game. And it's all there from the very beginning. Literally nothing has to be unlocked #If you learn how to do rolls and slides and boosts the game gets so fast and fun #And learning this stuff takes real work! The timing is REALLY tight on some of those moves #Battling enemies is it's whole separate skillset too. Like there are so many things you can do #So many ways to murder ✨✨✨✨ #Some of the best moments are times where you pull a 360 noscope on a cyan and send it tumbling through the air into the void #And doing your first slide-throw into a lizards underbelly #So risky but so rewarding #AND THIS IS ALL JUST THE BASE GAME! #The dlc is literally a mod that got so big the devs saw it and helped fund it #It adds so much to the game. Literally the mod devs asked themselves what crazy thing a slugcat could do #Coded it #And was like uhhh how does this fit into the lore #So that's how we got boomcat and Jesus Cat #I literally talked to one of the devs by chance (they're pretty active. You can just ask them stuff) and they admitted as such #It's great! gameplay first at its peak! #Anyways give the game a shot. If you want to Get Gud at a game rainworld is for you. It's a game entirely about skill #Not to mention... 400+ hours in and I'm still not done with the game #Prepare for the long haul

[miapcain]

@gadgetpatch has my new character shader nearly finished... Look at her... Look at my baby daughter Vesna she's so pretty now.... And go hire Dana for your projects she's the best tech artist you could wish for

#art #vesna #gamedev #tech art #3d #indie dev #shaders #tw flashing

[arcadebroke]

#Net Yaroze #playstation #design #hardware #tech #dev kit #retro gaming #gaming #video games #print ad #video games ad #ネットやろうぜ #development kit #console gaming #@ObsoleteSony

[pixelfireplace]

Pixel Fireplace title screen.

#Steam games #Pixel Fireplace #indie games #pixel art #fireplace #indiedev #game dev #game development #title screen #video games #pixel #pixel aesthetic #pixel gif #pixel graphics #crt #retrowave #retro tech #marshmallows #fire

[izicodes]

Sugary Scribbles | #8

Saturday 6th January 2024

IT'S BASICALLY WORKING (on larger screens)! My never-ending war on website responsiveness continues! I have a large screen and I stupidly only took into account of MY screen size. What I did do though is created a message for phone-table sizes because it just wouldn't make sense it working on really small devices - in my opinion~! But for now I will put this on hold because I am excited about my other project idea I came up with yesterday oops~!

This is my first project of the year and it's super adorable in my opinion! It paints, it erases, it deletes and it saves your artwork! Ticks all the boxes I made at the beginning of the project! Turned a simple 'Make a HTML painting webpage' into something more cuter and cool! Job well done! 😩🙌🏾💗

You can try it out (if you have a larger screen size), all that happens is the painting will be off the mouse direction a bit, sorry!

link to the Sugary-Scribbles web app! 🍡

Lastly, here is a cool drawing I made as I was testing the site~! I'm a better artist than this I swear, just not good using a mouse...

List of resources I used during the project

Figma - to plan the webpage

Canva: to make the header

Photopea: for further photo editing

RedKetchup: to colour pick quickly

CSS Animations: to add the zoom-in-n-out animation

MDN Canvas: to know what the element does properly

YouTube Tutorial: to get inspiration and extra help

Flaticon: for the icons and cursors

Html2canvas API: to turn the drawing into an image (tutorial)

That's all, have a nice day/night and happy coding! 🖤

#xc: project logs #sugary scribbles project #codeblr #coding #programming #progblr #studying #studyblr #dev logs #comp sci #computer science #programmer #devlogs #html css #javascript #tech #cute #adorable

[arkon-z]

If you played Age of Calamity and sneered at it for daring to interpret the story of Breath of the Wild a little differently and then went on to play Tears of the Kingdom, you owe Age of Calamity an apology.

#BOTW again #but everything Sheikah is Zonai now. #totk salt #AOC had SO much respect for BOTW that it included details that most people would have ignored #meanwhile TOTK just went #the devs explanation of the disappearance of the Sheikah tech boiled down to 'a wizard did it'

[xtekker]

This picture contains 4 GB of data.

Back in the 1930s computers were gaint machines, they worked on "punch card programing" and was mainly used to solve complex math problems, it wouldn't be until the 1950s that the one of the first "hard drive"s were invented by ERA, then called the "mag drum drive", IBM than brought ERA and refined the technology further.

This picture represents 4GB of data stored in punch card format, each row is 15 pallets long, stacked 2 pallets high, 45 boxes to a pallet, 2000 punch cards to a box, each card held 80 characters making this picture represent 4.3 billion characters of data.

Oh how far we've come in 93 years..

#programming #codeblr #coding #developer #tech #webdev #gamedev #programmer #devlog #game dev #old computers #ibm

[ganondoodle]

i talked about why i find the argument people love to use as an excuse as to why shiekah tech is all gone in totk that "they destroyed it bc they were afraid of it" dumb before many times so i wont go over my past points in detail again

- i was just reminded of that and thought of new points to rant about going from that, no evil intentions in mind just when sth is mentioned again after some time i think about it again and can come up with more stuff-

(past points being- how?? shiekah tech seemed pretty indestructable, especialyl the big structures; it seemed like it was a literal holy thing for alot of people in the game; that it would be pretty damn stupid to spend so much energy and probably endanger people to dismanlte it since that time and energy would be better used rebuilding important infrastrucutre instead; if it stopped working why wouldnt you just kinda .. leave it there; why in hells name would you get rid of the shrine of life .. and i guess monk miz kyoshia with it???; shouldnt they be MORE afraid of sonau tech then??)

new thoughts

wouldnt it be logical to research and develope shiekah tech MORE so you can make sure it cant get corrupted again, like a security measure idk anti virus if you will lol

on the specific idea of zelda using it ... shouldnt she be the BEST person to use it bc she could, if it somehow got corrupted again, cleanse it/instantly deactivate it more easily than anyone else??

on the point of people not beign afraid of sonau tech ... that is still like the biggest problem for me with that argument bc .. i get beign afraid of shiekah stuff going haywire again, but then if suddendly alien tech from a literally fully unknown group of people started to appear out of nowhere at the sAME TIME AS MALICE COMES BACK BUT WORSE in the form of miasma shoudlnt that ring your alarm bells and make you flee for your life?? i wouldnt trust that shit after knowing what happened to the tech that we DID know shit about

i know theres like researchers for it but also they really all meddle and play with it immediately like its for them just as much a toy as it is for us the players (also a point that made me feel weird about it ngl), they build businesses around it, made minigames out of it with civilians, use it for transportation with no thought or concern about it, its really weird when this is supposedly takign palce after BOTW where FAMOUSLY ancient barely reasaearched tech got corrupted by evil goo and nearly destroyed the entire land of hyrule (man are they LUCKY gan suddendly has zero interest in ANY tech)

(and i know theres the possibilty that sonau tech is somehow not able to be corrupted but it just seems so dumb anyway bc the people cant KNOW that for sure right of the bat??? and it DOES get possessed with the broken construct too, like .. wouldnt the possibility alone .. esepcialyl with waht had happened in botw make you NOT want to use that alien tech like a toy?? especially with WORSE malice being around suddendly too?? that just smells like a recipy for disaster)

(... man totk realyl is just botw but worse ... the more i think about it the more it feels like that)

#ganondoodles talks #zelda #totk #ganondoodles rants #shiekah tech BUT MORE ANCIENT AND COOLER #ancient gone people BUT COOLER AND MORE ANCIENT #malice BUT COOLER AND MORE DANGEROUS #the champions BUT COOLER AND MORE MAGICAL MCGUFFINY #zelda rescue BUT WORSE BC SHES A FARMABLE GLORIFIED STONE PEDESTAL NOW #shrines again BUT SONAU THIS TIME WEE #tragic loss of family and friends but of COOLER FAMILY AND FRIENDS #zelda character dev- .. oh wait nvm that got undone entirely #.. also how zelda gets the role of the stone pedestal while rauru gets the role of keeping gan in check #talk about downgrade

[linuxtldr]

Can't bots just trust we're human without the robot dance-off? 😄

#linux #linuxfan #linuxuser #ubuntu #debian #dev #devops #webdevelopment #programmingmemes #linuxmemes #memes #cat #coding #developer #tech #ethicalhacking #computerscience #coder #security #infosec #cyber

[acommonrose]

Bingbong and/or Shadowzel nation, how are we feeling

#baldur's gate 3 #bingbong #shadowheart #shadowzel #the world's lowest tech stream but they still facetimed dev to rp #Youtube

[jovial-thunder]

question about lancer tactics: with some modification, could it theoretically be used as a more automated version of a VTT? i've had the idea of making something similar to a tactics game, except multiplayer, the npc's are controlled by the dm instead of ai, and it'd have to be more of a framework you could easily add in any abilities/weapons you'd need, but part of me wonders if it's worth building the whole thing from scratch (as someone who would have to learn coding as well)

Not by us. Adding remote multiplayer is a huge swing (and has been the death of many projects), and we already are at capacity with the scope of "do a 100% port of Lancer to a CRPG".

For reference, Stardew Valley had an experienced dev from Chucklefish dedicated to adding multiplayer for more than a year (this was posted one year before the 1.3 multiplayer update released). We don't have anywhere near that level of resources.

That said, there's a neat project called IsoCON that is doing something like what you describe for Icon. The rules automation from what I've seen is very light (closer to having in-game reference ability text than AI-controlled units), but I think is a great model for what an game-specific indie VTT can realistically look like.

#lancer tactics #seriously multiplayer is the final boss of game dev #doing little tech demos of multiplayer is fine but it's a multiplier; once you have complicated game systems the whole thing balloons #“balloons” like the hidenburg to be clear #a Spec Ops: The Line dev famously called their added multiplayer features “a cancer on the disk”

[vynnyal]

Btw I'm basically speedrunning now

#Rain world #game clips #I've gotten a lot better since I made this video but I still love it. This will be my tenth challenge and I've spent like 7 hours on it lol #I mean 7 hours of actual attempts before I realized I need to get better to stand a chance. #So I'm smacking my friends in the face with rocks while sliding or have to wait for everyone to catch up all the time #Because now I can't NOT use the cool movement tech I've learned. It's so fun and useful and ✨fast✨ #It's actually saved our lives so many times. Nothing funnier than yelling ''BEND OVER'' to my buddy and absolutely booking it #Also since we've delved into the world of modded regions it's been extremely nice for the bs parkour people include for no reason 😭 #If I'M struggling good god it must be tough for casual players #SPEAKING OF MODS! I've been hanging out and talking with modders and oh my god they're all crazy #One of my favs was the deserted wastelands dev who was just. So jaded. it was so funny #And we're playing thru Drought which is very interesting. It has like. Multiple endings and stuff #Finally know who that striped black cat is lmao #Gonna post some fanart in the future because I'm actually in love. Moon is such a mom in this campaign #It's also a horribly glitchy mess that destroys your game files but wwyd

[sourearth]

bit of a random post, but my friends (and previously me) have been working on an indie game called arm of satan and its currently being livestreamed on steam nextfest!! very exciting!!!

if u like hell and mythology and cool art check it out !

#game dev #gamedev #indie game #im so proud of my bois!!!! #im not really an active dev anymore cause work takes up too much of my time #but i did a lot of the early tech art (like the lava shader) #and early art direction #it was a fun time and im glad theyre still working on it

[arcadebroke]

#work station #dev kit #desktop #hardware #tech #design #retro gaming #pc #sega dreamcast #playstation 2 #sega #kamen rider #soul calibur

[pixelfireplace]

Water. 🔊

#fireplace #Pixel Fireplace #pixel art #retro #indie games #cozy #cozycore #Steam games #indiedev #retrowave #80s #chill #game dev #retrocore #retro tech #80s aesthetic #Water #pixel animation #pixel #pixelated