My Experience With Hiking Apps

In 2018 I did my first trip to western Canada. Visiting Banff planted the seed in what would make me a hiker. Since then I’ve spent a fair bit of time around the Toronto area continuing to do more trails. I’ve gone up to the Bruce Peninsula, done hikes in Scotland, and been back to Banff as well. With all this I ran into All Trails which is probably the biggest online hiking community, at least that I am aware of. I mainly used it to find trails, but never used the paid version or looked at offline map support. This year I decided to change that.

SolidJS Object Destructuring

As I noted in my previous post, I have in the past explored SolidJS. It’s been a while, and since Solid Start hit 1.0, I decided to give it another try. While I am using the SolidStart for a project, I’m not doing any routing or using any complicated state. I’m keeping it simple by building a tic tac toe clone. However I ran into something pretty quickly that is admittedly well documented but was not obvious to me coming from React.

Experimenting with Svelte & SvelteKit

I recently created a fun little site for a podcast I listen to called DLC. For this site I took inspiration from some fan sites others have made for the Connected podcast where they track predictions and results the hosts make throughout the year. In the first episode of the year for DLC, they list out their predictions for what will happen in the games industry that year. Whether we’ll hear about certain titles, whether new consoles will be announced, etc. It’s a fun show, where they like to be rather bold with their predictions & hopes for the coming year. They also go through what they call “the reckoning” where they review last year’s predictions, and determine how good or not good they were with their predictions.

My Choice of Surface Hardware

I’m not a tech reviewer. Though I thought it might be nice to share my setup with other folks and my thinking behind it.

A Playdate Game

I decided to take a break from another game project I started on years ago. During COVID I did a off and on work on it. It was tricky to find motivation to build things all the time, even though one would have the free time. I hope to return to it in the future, but since late last year I got my hands on a Playdate, which is a simple mobile handheld gaming device.

Building a REST and Web Socket API with Actix and Rust

Actix version 4 update

This post was written for version 3, but version 4 has now hit RC. The post itself is not updated, but the completed app has been. You can see the changes I made to update the app here: https://github.com/agmcleod/questions-app-rust-actix/compare/75ede6206f33d8948faac2ef5e614d4793a3222a..main

The world of web development really has come a long way over the years. In late 90s to early 2000s I learned off various websites how to build web pages with HTML, tables, random JavaScript snippets, etc. Over time we got more sophisiticated server rendering options like asp, php, and then into MVC frame works like Rails and Django. Now we’re writing the backend side as full on REST apis, where all the server does is return data, and the client uses that data to populate the interface. The interface is built with a variety of technologies, one can still use tech like I did 6-7 years ago: server rendered pages in Rails and writing jQuery code to make things more dynamic. Which can work really well for a lot of applications, but when you need more dynamic control of a page, it becomes less scalable. This is where the modern frameworks like React & Angular come in.

Packaging a game for Windows, Mac, and Linux with Rust.

Building a cross platform game for desktop operating systems in Rust is fairly doable without needing much platform specific code. [Glutin][0] is a Rust alternative to SDL for handling window creation & input. [GFX][1] handles most of the graphics API abstraction for you. You still write the shaders, but I was able to just use OpenGL and get it working on Windows 10, MacOS, and Ubuntu.

Advent of Code 2018 - My Journey of Day 15

Advent of Code is a yearly advent calendar of code challenges. The idea that you get a new code challenge from the 1st through 25th of December. Each day has a part one, and a part two. Part two builds on part one, and depending on how you solved part one it can be easy or hard to figure out. Advent of Code started in 2015, and has continued every year since. I’m still in progress on finishing 2018, but have completed the other three years.

Energy Grid Released

This week I released Energy Grid. It’s out now for Windows, Mac, and Linux. You can find it here.

Energy Grid Update - Nearing The End

After my last update, I have since balanced a lot of the numbers, giving the player a choice in how to collect resources. Pollution in the game exists as a way to punish the player for building unclean energy gatherers. Pollution has been changed to be a tax percentage rather than a flat amount. Pollution as a flat amount could cripple the player at the start, and not matter later. Now it scales much better. This means that as your gatherers collect resources, and those resources are sold, pollution tax is deducted from that income as a percentage.