Souls Like Strings

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine.

Surely there are better ways to communicate than nausea-inducing singing

The follow up to A Memory Called Empire doesn't land quite as well with me due to its wider scope, but is still a worthy successor.

The aliens clearly set up as antagonists in the first book are back, and they brought so, so many new characters along for the ride. Many of them POV characters too, I don't remember there being anywhere near this many POV shifts (if any?) in the first book. Off the top of my...

Projects

After much consternation about presentation programs and making edits to my script in two places after copying it into the slide notes I finally got to give my talk, 10s to 100ms; Optimizing a Legacy Endpoint. The reception was definitely positive; I got 3 good questions afterwards when it's pretty rare to get one and a few people came up to say they enjoyed it. Someone even added me on Linkedin to tell me they liked it!

It was not problem free; I took a drink partway through and immediately regretted it, panicked and dropped the cap of...

Nothing Mid Beyond this Point

Why

• Genuinely unique approach to a metroidvania
• Basic but very evocative art style
• Combat system is a cool concept well executed
• Story is suprisingly interesting
• It just has the juice, couldn't put it down despite a frustrating start

Why Not

• Exploration can be painful until you get certain abilities
• Giving the second boss anti heal was certainly a choice

Impressions

This is not what I expected at all from a 580yen Metroidvania which looks like they didn't bother hiring a background artist. Nothing Beyond this Point is a great...

• You cannot convert a Webpack project to Vite in ~2 hours by making a plan with Copilot and letting it rip
  • Tomorrow we'll see if it made any meaningful progress and I just need to clean up, or it was a complete waste of time
  • Next day managed to clean up some errors in an hour, now stuck on not copying the dict files for kuromoji
• Don't always take requirements from a single engineer on a team at face value
  • Or you'll end up with two major refactors of what should have been a simple...

• Having the same failure message for every cause of failed login may be good for security
  • But it's pretty awful UX and can lead to a lot of false 'bug' reports
• Sometimes it's best to just slap a @ts-expect-error on everything and leave the big rewrite for later
  • Especially when being on old TS blocks a bunch of key dependency upgrades
• You don't always need a GIN index just cos it's a JSON column you're indexing
  • e.g. if there are two values and the index is just for checking they're unique with...