At a Glance

• LocalCI: An overhaul of the output styles
• Taylor Engine Examples: Making example games for Taylor
• Taylor Forum: Making a forum for Taylor
• Hanami: Starting to learn Hanami
• Interesting Links: Cool things I found this week

LocalCI

LocalCI can now generate Buildkite and SemaphoreCI pipeline YAML files. This means with just your Rakefile you can have a full Continuous Integration (CI) experience. There’s still more work required for the SemaphoreCI generation to allow specifying the image and machine type.

Implementing those features made me realise that when you run a job individually and it fails the CI suite passed. This was due to the way I structured the rake tasks. So that meant a minor refactor simplified this and resolved the issue.

I decided to finally post about LocalCI on Reddit. It got a handful of upvotes and even a few questions. Honestly, it went better than I expected. Check the thread out.

Taylor Engine Examples

Taylor engine examples are now up on GitHub. There’s no documentation and the first example has yet to be finished, but this helps solidify it to me as a real project. While I’ve been off work I wanted to work on these a lot more but have found myself quite distracted by other projects.

I did make some progress and got hitboxes working in the Jumpy Alien example. This is a basic game where you are an alien who is jumping through pipes and being careful not to hit them. I’m a bit disappointed with how I’ve structured this game so I might need to do a fairly serious refactor. Annoyingly every time I’ve tried to work on this project my time has been interrupted so I have a bit of an association with that now.

I hope to make a decent push on Jumpy Alien before going back to work next week.

Taylor Forum

I received an issue asking about a potential Discord server or some other type of synchronous communication platform. You can read the issue for more details but my stance is pretty simple. I don’t want to run a Discord as I think they’re terrible for building a knowledge base. Instead, I put forward the idea of a forum as they’re much more searchable and will help grow information about Taylor.

So I’ve started building that with Hanami which leads into the next section.

Hanami

I’ve finally started learning Hanami in earnest. I only started on Wednesday so I don’t have a massive amount to write about here, but I feel this section will be appearing a fair bit in coming brain dumps.

My initial impressions are mixed. I’m not surprised by that coming into this with 10~ years of Rails experience. I might summarise my feelings with some dot points.

Things I Liked

• Easy to install
• Excellent asset pipeline setup
• Sensible folder structure
• Procfile.dev just worked with devinator

Things I Disliked

• Very few helpers
• Lack of authentication libraries
• Guides are a bit hit and miss
• Lack of documentation

Overall I’ve been having fun and I’m impressed with how far it has grown. I did find Rodauth and Warden guides and decided to follow the Warden guide as it felt the more appropriate for my scale. I’m having to make a lot of alterations so I am planning to do a separate blog post documenting how it has changed.

Interesting Links

Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi: Nina’s journey to get Windows 2 running on an interesting computer.

Revisiting HTML streaming for modern web performance: Streaming HTML to the browser in chunks with web components.

Web Dev with Rust: An interesting thread on Mastodon about using Rust for web development that is eerily similar to my experience using Go.

Charm for Ruby: A new library porting Charm to Ruby. It currently segfaults on my machine but I’m very excited as I’ve been envious of Go having Charm.

FediMeteo: How a Tiny €4 FreeBSD VPS Became a Global Weather Service for Thousands: I love a good story about using a cheap Virtual Private Server (VPS) to do a lot.