Recent content in Home on Abban Dunne - Fix your hearts or die
When I didn’t learn Rails I wasn’t left behind. 
 When I didn’t move all my databases to MongoDB I wasn’t left behind. 
 When I didn’t go serverless I wasn’t left behind. 
 When I didn’t learn React I wasn’t left behind. 
 When I didn’t make all my things microservices I wasn’t left behind. 
 When I didn’t learn…
It’s been a long time since I made a WIP update on here but I’ve been very busy. Fuck so busy. I’ve been learning and applying web accessibility in my job which it turns out is extremely rewarding work, and it makes it hard to focus with intensity on 2 separate ongoing projects that I’m very invested in. But in that I still managed to get a lot of things done on the game.…
I don’t like TODOs. 
 I can concede they have some benefits, I often use them when I’m working on a thing to indicate stuff I still have to finalise in Draft Code . They’re short-lived indicators of open branches in the code, or things that need to be updated when other things are changed. They’re reminders of things left to be done and for early reviewers to get a sign…
The last few weeks I’ve been making props and fleshing out a little bit of world to plop some quests into. 
 Hay Bales 


 
		 
			 
		 
 Village 


 
		 
			 
		
I spent this week backfilling unit tests and have no progress to show off. But, I’ve been meaning to document the patterns I use to build my game architecture for about a year now so here goes with the first one. 
 This is not an opinionated guide on how to do factories, probably not even the best pattern for it, but it is the way I like to do it .
This week I refactored my input system, and added the first flows for the quest system 
 Accepting Quests 


 
		 
			 
		
This week in the evenings I took some low hanging fruit and worked on UI. 
 Pause Menu Testing 


 
		 
			 
		 
 Quest Marker 


 
		 
			 
		
So over the last few weeks I’ve finished the first pass on the UFO effects, and started designing and implementing the dialogue/narration system using Yarn Spinner. 
 UFO Effects 


 
		 
			 
		 
 Dialogue 


 
		 
			 
		
I now have a dedicated time slot to work on game development. This is the little prototype I’m now working on. 
 UFO 


 
		 
			 
		 
 Camera Controller 


 
		 
			 
		
Still poking at this, I will eventually have a vertical slice ready. Maybe even in 2023. 
 Test Level 


 
		 
			 
		 
 Working on UI 


 
		 
			 
		
I enjoy working on UI/UX & design in general. I do design & illustration using the Affinity suite. I’m pretty decent at 3D modelling in Blender, & I have fun animating.
I published my first game in 2016, & while I work mostly in Unity, I do quite like Godot. I’ve been working on a game about a UFO since the start of 2024.
I have been working as a web developer since 2002. I’ve been a Full Stack Engineer in WMDE since 2020, where for the last few years my focus has been on accessibility & web standards.
A roundup of the things I learned in the 23rd week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 You can use interface inheritance to pass versions of entities back from a bounded context use case rather than using a DTO. See here for a php example . It works better in C# though because it’s more type strict. Php will still allow you to call a method that exists on an object but not in it’s…
A roundup of the things I learned from the 19th to the 22nd week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 Been re-reading Clean Architecture and implementing it in a game prototype in order to learn Clean and DDD in more detail. 
 Have an idea to not have to use DTOs when you use clean architecture inside a monolith. Need to write about it. 
 
 Professional 
 Coming soon to a post near…
I’ve had a good run of movies. Didn’t really know anything about this going in and was blown away. It was funny, full of cool action, and sentimental all at once. Left me feeling pretty nice at the end. 
 5/5 Hot Dog Fingers 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭
After watching The Northman I realised I’d never seen this. What a great movie, loved everything about it. I especially enjoyed how the constant fog horn put everything on edge. 
 5/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭
I like Eggers a lot and this was a pretty good movie. Just a tad long. 
 4/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭
I started designing the main menu and start screen. 
 

A roundup of the things I learned in the 18th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 PHP Named Parameters are a good way of making different versions of an object you want to test that has a lot of constructor parameters. In your test you can add a method that returns your object with the constructor arguments as nullable parameters, then default them. Then when you need to pass different…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 17th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Professional 
 
 Watched Technical Leadership and Glue Work . I highly recommend it. I’ve been struggling to get my head around the leadership responsibilities expected of me, and I liked having a clear explanation of how I can be doing things better. 
 Tanya…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 16th week of 2022. Annual leave for a week did some game development. 
 Game Dev 
 
 Brushed up on animation in Blender by animating an idle, walk, jump, and fall for a player character. 
 Level design, you can see some images here . 
 
 Professional 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Personal Notes 
 Coming soon to a…
I had a few days off and worked on a pet project. It’s a game idea I had in 2020 and have been slowly working on when I have the head space. 
 I spent the week white-boxing then filling out a small level and you can see the images below. 
 
 
 
 
 

A roundup of the things I learned in the 15th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 A week of refactoring. 
 
 Professional 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Personal Notes 
 Coming soon to a post near you
A roundup of the things I learned in the 14th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 Learned how the V2 PayPal API works. It’s pretty similar to Stripe. Created a Test Application . 
 When using Nginx with Docker don’t mount your nginx.conf file into the conf.d folder as there’s a default file in there that will override it. Instead mount a folder containing your…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 13th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 In php if you have code on an abstract class that checks for interface implementations, when called by a child it will check what the child implements rather than the parent. This is handy when you have a few slightly differently functioning children. 
 PhpStan does not like this however. Though there is…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 12th week of 2022. Quiet week. 
 Technical 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Professional 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Personal Notes 
 Coming soon to a post near you
My thoughts in italic . 
 Intro 
 Basics 
 Affects way more people that you might think. 
 
 A11y is not an accessible name. 
 15% of the world have disabilities Fuck, we work harder on IE support than we do on accessibility 
 Auditory, Cognitive, Neurological, physical, speech, visual Can be permanent or temporary, must be much harder for them 
 Old people. 
…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 11th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 Handy typesafe Spy Generator . 
 PhpStan on level 9 is very strict. You basically have to be as typesafe as C#. 
 
 Professional 
 
 Notes from an accessibility workshop I attended. 
 
 Personal Notes 
 Coming soon to a post near you
Really enjoyed this comic, the art and supernatual themes were right up my alley. As a parent trying to juggle a small person and work some of it really struck home. I just think it was let down a little by the rushed storytelling. 
 3/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭
A roundup of the things I learned in the 10th week of 2022. Short week. 
 Technical 
 
 Getting Travis to run Docker tests with MySQL is trickier than it should be. You need to use a script to wait for the database to be available as depends_on only waits for the container to be running. 
 
 Professional 
 Coming soon to a post near you 
 Personal Notes 
 Coming…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 9th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 Doctrine doesn’t escape column names so you shouldn’t use a MySQL reserved word as a column name. 
 To view the SQL you’re trying to run in Doctrine you can set a logger
 $debug = new DebugStack (); 
 $em -> getConnection () -> getConfiguration () -> setSQLLogger ( $debug ); 
…
A roundup of the things I learned in the 8th week of 2022. 
 Technical 
 
 LAST_INSERT_ID() in MySQL is transactional and will return the last ID per connection. 
 Using php PDO you need to use beginTransaction() in order to make your query transactional and ensure you get the last ID back correctly. 
 Php 8.1 enums can have methods! . 
 ID Pre-Generation can be handled by…
TV show follow up to 2021’s Suicide Squad movie. I loved it, This show knows that there’s never a wrong time to rock. John Cena is surprisingly great in a comedy role, much better than when he’s cast straight. 
 5/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭
I made a spin off of Wordle as a programming exercise on my parental leave. This is a document of the things I learned. The repository is here . 
 Learnings follow. 
 Pseudorandom Generation 
 The daily word is selected from a list pseudorandomly using a seed generated from the current day’s date. 
 Lazy Local Storage 
 There are a few things stored in local storage, and…
The Court of Owls & The City of Owls . I’d heard these were good from multiple people so I decided to check them out and wow yes they are. Enough to make me buy the rest of the Scott Snyder run. I only wish DC had been making movies of this Batman rather than the trash they’ve been putting in the cinemas. 
 5/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭
This is a follow up TV show to the 2010 (wow has it been that long!?) movie. It’s pretty great, star studded, great writing, very funny. The TV format suits it a lot more too. 
 5/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭🌭
The Ready Player One of Ghostbuster movies. This thing was only made in order to please all the people who piled on online when the Paul Feig one was announced and it shows. Remember proton packs? Remember marshmallow man? Remember Twinkies? 
 1/5 Hot Dogs 🌭
Everyone seems to have hated this but I quite enjoyed it. It takes nothing away from the story of the earlier movies and finally gives Neo and Trinity a decent send off. I only hope they don’t use this as a jumping off point to make endless sequels. 
 4/5 Hot Dogs 🌭🌭🌭🌭
I discovered a nice cheat sheet reference for loads of languages https://quickref.me . Check out this handy flexbox snippet .
While making this journal I discovered a neat trick for animating list elements sequentially without having to use javascript. 
 It involves CSS Custom Properties and animation-delay . 
 The Trick 
 What I didn’t know before is that you can set a CSS variable as a html inline style and that can be picked up to be used by your stylesheets. So when you loop out elements you can do…
When I did my 2021 end of year review in work recently, I realised that by being completely lazy towards documenting the things I’ve been doing I was hurting myself. I didn’t have any grasp on the things I accomplished, learned, or how I grew. I had nothing to point me towards any future goals. 
 So I made myself a New Year’s Resolution that I would start keeping a journal…
I’m a UX Engineer & Indie Game Developer who’s been making stuff with computers since spacer.gif was a thing.
It’s not super important that the people around me approve of my ethics.
I am committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of technology or ability. And I am actively working to increase the accessibility and usability of this website and in doing so adhere to many of the available standards and guidelines. 
 This website endeavours to conform to level Double-A of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Content…
This was a game where the player must listen to numbers being read, and dial a phone. It’s aim was to be a tool to help people learn numbers in a new language.
This is a bunch of things about my personal ethics, what I like, what I dislike, my strengths and weaknesses etc. 
 Its purpose is to serve as a guide for people on how to interact with me in professional and social contexts.
My desk setup. 
 
 M4 Max Mac Studio 
 42 inch LG ultrawide 5k2k monitor 
 Ergotron monitor stand 
 Keychron Q3 Pro 
 Razer Basilisk Pro 
 Katamari desk mat 
 Fully Jarvis standing desk 
 IKEA Markus 

I like to be constantly learning new things.