Oh the irony of talking about things not being maintained and then not updating my blog for ~2 months. Awkies! Anyway, I’ve been busy with tasks, some things more important that others. I’ll try to be better. I might even try #100daystooffload.

Highest priority, I finished Black Mesa, the fan-remake of Half Life in the Source engine. Overall, I enjoyed it, but there were a few detractors.

  • Performance was pretty variable, but that could be the nature of playing on Linux/Proton. Some of the biggest arenas, which should have been highlights, were a real struggle to get through with <20 FPS sometimes. Oof
  • Combat overall feels more lethal than I remember the original HL
  • As a corollary of the above, I tended to yo-yo between having full health and being nearly dead. The tension would have been raised if I was harder to kill but there were fewer resources around
  • A similar story with ammunition; I generally wasn’t even close to running out

If you’re a fan, it’s worth a spin but for the real nostalgia kick I’d go back to HL.

Currently I’m vaporising struts in Hardspace: Shipbreaker. It’s in early access and is pretty limited at the moment, but I really like the direction and aesthetic that they’re going with.

So my last post was around Kubernetes and what the coding-on-k8s experience might be like. The TL;DR is that I’m going to wait for that to mature 😅. In general, I’m thinking about replacing the k8s setup with Docker Swarm. I had previously avoided it due to all the drama around it when it was released and bundled in with Docker; which is really a shame! It seems to provide a pretty solid experience with not nearly the complexity or pain of Kubernetes. Pair it up with Portainer and you’re starting to make containers really approachable for people that don’t want to touch a CLI. I’m not one of those people but I do work with them, so it really makes selling containerisation a lot easier.

The Swarm/K8S thing is a little apple for oranges and I’m glad that I did get some experience with K8S but let’s just say… I’m not going to be rushing back to K8S unless there’s a desperate need to use it. Which is really how it should be. ✌️

I’ve been playing around with a few tech things recently. As usual, starting things and dropping them for the next shiny.

  • Buffalo: I like it but I’d like a long-form blog post on getting started. I should probably try that 😓
  • Colly: scrape all the things!
  • Dgraph: Pretty cool! The standalone docker image made it really easy to get going. I really ought to read a book on how best to architect things in graph databases though! Still, learn things, break things, learn more things.

Maybe expect a post on Svelte, I recently heard about this while listening to the Go Time podcast and after having a poke around the quick-start it looks pretty schmick. 👌