The last time I wrote anything around here has been… a little over 7 years ago. Ha! Back then, I wrote about moving things over to Gitea, and using git post-receive hooks to automatically build and update this website. Well, I never ended up using that, and I clearly knew it at the time, as I wrote:
Will this mean that I’ll be writing more often here? Probably not.
A heck of a lot has happened since then; I stopped using Gitea due to lack of willpower to maintain my setup. I quit my job in The Netherlands and moved to Sweden to become a consultant. I spawned many git repositories. I learned about this transformer architecture thing and played around with GPT models to understand how they could be used (barely, at the time - though it was exciting!). I quit my consultancy job and joined Amazon Web Services as a Solutions Architect, where I’m still employed today. At AWS, I help our gaming customers and basically make sure their games launch nice and well, which is a fairly fun job! I got to talk at re:Invent about some of it, which was quite exciting. (and obviously I’m doing a decent amount of AI stuff there as well, which is honestly also quite exciting as well!).
I started seriously spending time with GZDoom and the Godot engine, and over the years I’ve made many silly GZDoom[1] and Selaco[2] mods. I made my own programming language / runtime VM: Tzo. I also launched the first version of my latest Noctis IV related project: System Reset, a modern port that aims to be as authentic as possible! I should probably write much more about this, because it’s a very cool project with a lot of interesting tech underneath it. Maybe more on that later!
Anyways, I don’t really do blogposts without switching around how I make his website, so I suppose I should tell you what I’ve done recently on the tech side of things; I switched over from Pelican, a static site generator powered by Python, to Astro, which is a JavaScript static site web framework. Honestly I liked Pelican, but when updating it some of my styles and page generation broke, so I figured it was time for another overhaul. So far I like Astro; it’s simple but built using tech I’m familiar with. We’ll see how long I’ll keep this - I know unfortunately all too well that the JavaScript landscape can be quite brittle, especially the last few years as ECMAScript, TypeScript and ES Modules have evolved significantly, and codebases have moved away from CommonJS.
The way I deploy this has also changed; git post-receive hooks are out, because I no longer use Gitea. I’m now using my own custom ‘CI task runner’. To be fair I should probably be using GitHub Actions, but where’s the fun in that!? My own task runner is janky as heck but has some cool features that I think are somewhat innovative? More on that later. Maybe.
I don’t really have much more to say, and I should probably sign off before I promise to produce (maybe) even more blog posts later, so, err… Let me :wave: and do a git commit to push this out there ;)
[1] - Hellroads (video demo), Intruder Alert (video demo), and RetroTokyo (video demo).
[2] - TOKYO° Visor - a mod inspired by Neotokyo° and based on my RetroTokyo codebase (video demo), VAC-Bot with a Knife, Bad Apple for VAC-Bots (video demo), and Triangle Factory (video demo) which is basically just an implementation of a dumb meme, heh..