Souls Like Strings

Yep, that's a Daniel Mullins game

Why

• Typically deft 'game about games' from this dev
• The more different games you play the more you'll enjoy this
• 'Break/build the game' sections are a highlight gameplay-wise

Why Not

• Genre-hopping affects pacing if you dislike some genres
• Don't try the 'Space Marine' sections on a trackpad

Impressions

You might think being known for 4th-wall breaking meta-games might blunt the impact of said games, but that doesn't stop Daniel Mullins churning out bangers. Inscryption set a high bar; and while The Hex doesn't quite reach it a...

• Don't assume prod resources are in the prod AWS account and staging resources are in the staging one
  • Turns out both staging & prod S3 buckets for the React app are in the prod account, along with the prod Cloudfront
  • But staging Cloudfront is in the staging account, explaining why CI could never find the Cloudfront distro let alone invalidate it
• It's possible to have ~4 hours of meetings in a day and still feel productive
• state is meant to be a random, opaque value in OAuth
  • It's definitely not meant to be a nested...

• After spending far too long wondering if things are safe to have in the URL I'm of the firm belief that every request type should allow a body
  • Luckily the upcoming QUERY method has my back
• It's possible for a professional, senior web developer to not know how to use a native multi-select
  • And of course he suggested a JS package which provides a dropdown select as an alternative
  • The JS framework brainrot is real
• A commonly overlooked drawback of using LLMs is the effect it has on other people's productivity
  ...

I bet you're hoping I do-nut make any puns

Why

• Satisfying core loop
• Expands (slightly) beyond 'eat small then big'

Why Not

• Doesn't expand on the core concept enough to be memorable
• Story best described as 'functional' and 'there'

Impressions

You can spend a solid 2 hours with Donut County, but you might not remember them in a month. The concept is fun (you control a hole which grows as it eats) and there are some nice touches of humour, but despite some token efforts at puzzles nothing much changes from the first...

• Writing tests for a migration from qs to URLSearchParams takes way longer than the actual changes
  • But probably saves even longer than that in future emergency debugging
• Old browsers used to accept ; as a separator in query strings rather than ?
• Apparently asking the user for their login info so you can reproduce the issue is a valid solution
  • Admittedly their account is entirely unusable and we have no idea what's happening after weeks
• Microservices work much better if they're actually separate; i.e. changing a user's unconfirmed email doesn't require manually propagating...