Retro

2026 February Retro

What Went Well

Projects

From time to time I make forays into old Slack threads and Confluence pages looking for stuff I can use in my talk, but that's about it at the moment. The Cloudflare spending tracker seems doomed to forever be about a day of sustained effort away from done.

Games

Roadwarden taught me that maybe I wouldn't like DnD as much as I've always assumed; despite the obvious care with which it was made and quality as a game of its genre it just wasn't for me.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits lived up to its...

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2026 January Retro

What Went Well

Projects

Finally decided to give a talk at Tokyo Rubyist and mentioned it to enough people that I can't back out now unless legal just tells me I can't do it. I have until sometime in April, so naturally I'll start working on it once I get back from the honeymoon in late March. Any earlier would be wasting valuable panic-energy.

Other than that the only thing keeping my Github graph green continues to be this blog; I'm pretty sure I'm just a date-filtering system & deploy away from the new spending tracker but never seem...

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2025 December Retro

What Went Well

Projects

Plenty of game & books reviews here, not so much progress on any coding projects because of that. Not so much being none, zip, zilch.

Games

SILKSONG IS DONE! What an incredible game, but man it took me a long time to beat. When it came out I wasn't expecting to sink anywhere near as much time into it as Elden Ring, but apparently Team Cherry made a(nother? Didn't finish to original back in the day) 100+ hour metroidvania. Or I'm just terrible at Silksong's combat, which is definitely possible. Either way it's definitely my...

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2025 November Retro

What went well

Projects

  • Kept writing this blog
  • Some minor progress on the spending tracker, mainly styling the transaction dialog and making it usable for editing as well

Games

Silksong continues to be incredible; now 70 hours in, not even done with Act 2 and still absolutely loving it. I even enjoyed the famously rough Bilewater boss & its accompanying runback (plus pre-boss gauntlet!). Every moment with Silksong feels special, and I'm going to take my time finishing it because once it's gone all that's left is a replay of the original.

In service of taking my...

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2025 October Retro

What went well

Projects

  • Month 3 of regularly posting here!
  • Actually made some progress on the spending tracker
    • albeit I'm just porting stuff over from Svelte to React so not a lot of thinking involved

Games

Mostly more Silksong & Hades 2; man those are long games. In Hades I finally finished off Typhon, then beat him twice more, while beating Chronos is a given unless I crank the fear way past 10. Two more Typhon kills and I'll have the ingredients for what I assume are the incantations which start the leadup...

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2025 September Retro

What went well

Projects

  • Kept writing this blog
  • Nothing else this month haha

Games

Well I was right about Silksong being the main focus in last month's retro; didn't anticipate Hades 2 though. Absolutely crazy those two came out in the same month; both live up to their hype which is incredible given Silksong's 7 year development time and all the memes. Hades was a safer bet since it somehow spent its whole early access at Overwhelmingly Positive, but even given that it's an amazing example of how to make a 'more, but better' sequel. Really...

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2025 August Retro

What went well

Projects

  • Migrated this blog to 11ty
    • started adding more of my own to it
    • and started producing a lot more content, not just the weekly TWIL
  • Added a 'Links' section to TWIL posts and found a lot of great sites for my RSS feed
    • Feels like I have a steady flow of quality articles to read that I'm pretty happy with now
    • Once you get it set up RSS is so much better than trusting the algorithm, and blogs I like linking to blogs they like makes that much easier
  • ...
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