Souls Like Strings

Josh w Comeau

Topics

• CSS
• JavaScript
• General webdev

Why?

So many reasons, not least of which is that when I went to his blog to grab the link and paste it here, I discovered a new rainbow image on his home page. Then I noticed the parts of the rainbow followed my mouse around, and as I wiggled the rainbow around like a snake charmer I noticed a settings icon, which opened a slickly animated modal which allows me to change various properties of the rainbow for all users of the site (I checked on another device)....

• Being on the other side of an interview (albeit a screening interview) is really weird
  • Really drives home how nervous and eager to please you must look when you see someone else going through it
  • Also, since it was just a screening I still don't really know what a PM does...
• Global setup for Playwright seems a bit finicky
  • We tried adding a page.on to catch and throw React errors rather than ignoring them
  • While it worked in the test body it didn't do anything in a beforeEach or test in the setup file
  ...

The Bright Sword by Lev Grossman.

A classic Arthurian legend; minus the Arthur.

This book subverts expectations so often that it wraps right back around to meeting them again, but it's still an enjoyable read. As the story takes great pains to impress upon you, Arthurian legends should be filled with gallant knights rescuing damsels in distress and undertaking glamourous quests for King and Country. In this version of Camelot though, the knights are decidedly human with all the vices that entails, the damsels are quite capable of rescuing themselves and the last glamourous quest severely culled...

What if Jesus where a blue haired teenage girl?

Why

• Cozy game which doesn't ask too much of you but provides some nice worldbuilding and story
• Fun core gameplay loop
• Your journal has a cool art style and offers background on the world, incentivising collectible hunting
• Overall art direction is a good fit

Why Not

• A little janky at times
• Combat feels like an absolute chore, apart from one specific enemy type

Impressions

First impressions were great, it's clearly not meant to be challenging but the movement feels fluid, voice acting and art are...

• It's amazing the difference in perceived quality replacing a loading spinner with a skeleton can make
• Migrating an endpoint from only returning a single record to an id-keyed hash of them went smoothly
  • First modified it to accept both the single id and an array of them with different branches
  • Then added a new API call to the frontend which used it to condense multiple existing calls into one
  • Once that was live and known to work in prod, moved all the single calls to the multi-endpoint passing a single element array of ids
  • Finally removed the single...