Hello World (again)

I've had a blog a few times. My most recent was https://steveindusteves.substack.com/ but I haven't posted there in over a year. This next year I want to write more so obviously that means I needed a new blog. I'm planning to follow a style similar to "week notes"^[1] where I post each week just about whatever new things I've discovered or started hacking on that week. I hope that this super low entry bar will help me just ship and get into a regular blogging habit.

Since next week is the first of the year we'll call that the first actual post. Here's a little dump of some things I've done or discovered this year to prepare for that.

I really learned a lot about "modern" front-end stuff this year. There are some really exciting things going on. I knew a bit about nextjs and react because we use them at work. There are a lot of other cool things in that ecosystem like https://trpc.io/ that make the frontend/backend divide a lot easier. I played around with Deno and Astro and Solid and even Leptos. These are all worth checking out and could be whole posts of their own in the future.

I also played around with a bunch of new products that I like a lot. Supabase and Planetscale and Clerk were all really nice finds and I like them all for different reasons.

One thing I started actually building is a programming language for random data generation. I was calling it "AmpleSamp" and I learned a lot building a small prototype. I built a little virtual machine which was really fun, I learned some new tricks from Crafting Interpreters while I did it. I never got to the real features of the language which are "constrained random value generation" and I also sort of think a custom language for this isn't a great idea anymore. I'm going to try this again in the future just as a library or even just a configurable model thing. You can check out the prototype and the code if you want. I build the front-end in Astro and learned a lot of CSS in the process.

I'm not sure what I want to get into in the future. I have some ideas.

• A new kind of graphical debugger/VM hybrid that shows you exactly what the computer is doing.

• A bot that plays some sort of game. Previously I've tried to write bots for the binding of Isaac but getting past the "recognize things on the screen" part was always too hard. Maybe a card game or a board game or something where I can play with some fun algorithms like Monte Carlo tree search rather than get into deep learning or something like that.

• Make a game?

• Start some simple products? IDK

• Write a book?

• Some sort of procedural generation art or game?

• A new blog? (jk hopefully)

Who knows what I'll do? If you wanna find out you can learn all about it here.

1. Was introduced to the "weeknotes" format by Justin, the guy that runs Buttondown. It's a really cool newsletter where he writes about building Buttondown.