2026-02-16 @ 14:50PDT
Wow, it's been a long time since I've put something up here.
I've tried to make it easier for myself to write and post things, by making a small script that converts markdown posts into an HTML formatted simple page and places it into the blog. It feels in a certain way that I'm recreating static site generators from scratch, but that's fun for me. I'll probably tool around with it and make a bunch more changes before I'm satisfied.
I really came back here to start playing around with some simple web game development. I'm going to start building things out of the /games/ directory, so it'll be interesting to look back in the future and see what becomes of that. I think I may be getting ahead of myself building out into a /games/libs/engine/v1/index.js but on the other hand I've run into so many work issues with versioning that I really think I can avoid too much headache by storing things there. I have a lot to learn about javascript module systems, and how to import things and get it all to play nice in the browser, but that's the excitement.
I know that there's lots of people who feel some kind of way about AI tooling (which is all the new hotness right now) but I'm hoping to avoid using that heavily for this learning phase. I think it has it's place, perhaps as a code reviewer for this single project that will have no other eyes on it, but I think that I value the writing of things by hand so that I understand it. I'm convinced that the web is such a powerful platform to build for because of the interpreted nature of JS, and the ability to create bundled single page applications. But I do feel hampered by not really knowing how to pull together quality html and css and javascript. I'm hoping that by the end of my work on this first iteration of a games library that I'll be closer to my comfort level in java, where I can just open up a file and start typing into it and eventually have that run.
I do notice that even writing scripts here, the AI systems have their fingers in the IDE so strongly. I'm using Pycharm and it has suggested very wise full-line autocompletes that rely on understanding of the os.path library that I didn't have. This has been probably happening in my Java IDE for a while, but since it made sense to me, it wasn't so surprising. But when you're learning a new language (python, js) and the correct answer is auto-completed for you from context it's kinda spooky.