Souls Like Strings

TWIL May 1st 2026

  • 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...
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TWIL April 24th 2026

  • 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...
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Planet of Lana

More like Planet of Mui

Why

  • An rare brightly colored Inside-like
  • Also considerably more hopeful
  • Makes great use of its 'simple' art style
  • Great framing/atmosphere, I took so many screenshots

Why Not

  • You hate puzzles

Impressions

Planet of Lana takes the classic INSIDE-like formula and iterates on it with two great additions; non-monochrome colors and Mui, your dog-shaped puzzle solving companion.

The game kicks off with Lana in an idyllic looking fishing village, getting up to wholesome mischief with her sister Elo. Sadly some machines show up to interrupt their sisterly bonding time, capturing...

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The Saint of Bright Doors

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera.

The Saint of Bright Doors opens strong and doesn't let up, as a young Fetter's mother rips his shadow from him to make him a more efficient instrument of death aimed at his father, The Perfect and Kind. The first chapter acts as a prologue; chronicling Fetter's childhood of training to be an assassin, before jumping years into the future where he's just another guy in a fantasy New York run by religious fanatics and racists.

The worldbuilding is great; it reveals enough to keep you interested while holding enough...

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TWIL April 17th 2026

  • When working across teams, be very clear about timelines and progress
    • Or you'll end up in a meeting saying you've been blocked by their lack of progress for weeks while they look like a shocked Pikachu
  • I still don't think raising specific exceptions then catching them is a good way of handling errors
    • But it's definitely an improvement over throwing and rescuing a single exception for everything which just shows an error screen anyway after being caught
  • Stopping to drink water during your talk adds a surprising amount of time; ~30 seconds per...
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