Slow Animations for Focusing https://slowanimations.com A collection of slow, undistracting animations that you can use for focusing or other -ings. When I created this project, I had two main purposes: to make money (eventually), and to learn how to create animations. So far, I'm accomplishing the second purpose.
Lately, I've been launching more and more static sites. At first, I thought that I would always be happy using GitHub Pages, but it turns out, I was not. So I've been exploring other static website hosting providers. Allow me to share my first impressions with each of them. This will be brief, and in no particular order. GitHub Pages Easy to start with. No redirects. Very limited flexibility,…
I use Firefox as my main browser, especially on desktops. I rely on many of its features, and I also really don't want to use Chrome or a Chromium-based browser. Google has been marketing Chrome for years and years, and it's becoming a problem. The web is supposed to be an open platform, not controlled by any one company or government. But because the majority of people use Chrome, Google has a…
LocalStatus: monitor your local dev environment This might sound familiar: you're coding, tweaking, and developing your application, when suddenly, some part of it stops working. You undo some changes, check Git, and restart the service, but it's still broken. After hours of trying to find the problem, you realize that you forgot to run the latest migrations on your local database, so it was…
Hey, the site is now generated with Zola instead of Hugo. I've done some tests, and I don't think the RSS feed will get messed up, but if it does, please bear with me. 🙏
Update: I have added GoatCounter analytics to the site. See the "fine print" section on the homepage. I have a bit of a dilemma. On one hand, I dislike detailed tracking on the web; I think it's intrusive and dumb. And I don't need it for my sites, anyway. I'm not growing businesses. But I also really like external validation, so I want to have some way of knowing when people check out my…
(This post was originally titled "The Wrong Way to Avoid XML.") I'm a newcomer to Visual Studio, and at work, I use it to develop projects written in both .NET Framework and newer .NET versions. Occasionally, when I want to edit or view a .csproj file, Visual Studio will open a GUI instead. This is absolutely maddening for me. For a while, this had me thinking that Visual Studio was foolishly…
When writing a project with unit tests, I find it helpful to write a few tests that are more about what the code expresses , rather than what it does . I thought of the concept and the name when writing code for a chess game (side project, private repo). I wanted to write some unit tests that got me started with some class names, method names, and high-level concepts in the code. For example:…
This year, I discovered Advent of Code, and it's been a ton of fun! I want to write about my experience with the puzzles. While this has the potential to mostly be me rambling on, I'll try to make it interesting. I'm not trying to speed through these puzzles or even solve them the night they come out. I work on most of them days after they're released. So far, I've used Go, Lua, C#, and Python.…
It's been a few years since I updated this site, and now I want to update it again. I've tweaked the theme to be primarily dark, I'll add some links to recent projects, and I'll backdate some new posts to kind of make this a "journal" of my experience with software development.
GitHub Mastodon If you're here, hello. I just hope you have a great day, and I hope you find something useful or amusing on my site.
Potterscore is a simple but pretty score-keeping tool. It is designed to be used at an in-person Harry Potter-themed party, with House Points nicely displayed on a large screen. I didn't create the graphics; my sister did. She's great! As long as it's free for me to host (and it is, because it's a static site), you can see it and use it as much as you like. potterscore.tylermumford.com source code
I enjoyed the Stock Market Game so much that I wanted to create another pandemic-friendly game people could play together over a voice/video call. On a whim, I decided to create a multiplayer version of minesweeper . Of course, other people had done this before, but everything I found online involved players working together on the same area of mines. I wanted my version to feel more original, so…
https://stocks.tylermumford.com I learned about the "stock market game" from my brother-in-law during the pandemic. We originally played it with the help of a spreadsheet, and it was a lot of fun. I decided to make a dedicated web app for playing the game. (It's not really about the stock market, but "stock market game" is what we've always called it.) It's a single page app with no backend, so…
Here’s my current plan for the code of Space Trader Returns. Space Trader is written in C, and I want to rewrite it in Go. These two languages have fairly similar syntax, and I think Go can express all the same concepts as C (and then some). So I’m converting the source files, mostly by hand. I’d love to design the perfect architecture for this before writing a single line of code, and I’d love to…
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a game called Space Trader . Since smartphones hadn’t been invented yet, it ran on Palm devices. I was perhaps twelve years old at the time, and I loved to play this game. I spent weeks trading goods, fleeing from pirates and police, and trying to earn enough money to retire to my own moon. Like most software of days past, Space Trader has been…
I chose to learn Go during my Programming Languages course in college, when we were told to find a new language to learn. I was tired of the chaos of JavaScript and PHP, and I was drawn to the idea of non-OO, statically typed code without manual memory management. While I haven't built anything professional-grade with Go yet, I have used it to begin building two sites (one of which works! ;), and…
I want to respond to " The Dark Side of Polyfilling CSS " by Philip Walton. At the end of the article is this hashtag: #makecssfatigueathing I disagree completely. Putting aside the fact that the word "fatigue" has only negative connotations, CSS is already different enough between browsers. If a CSS snippet's meaning can be changed at will by JavaScript, then: There will be more code in the…
This is a simple website. It's all about Markdown and HTML. Gen 3 🏔️ The site is currently using the Zola static site generator to put everything together. The HTML and CSS are written by me. I'm really pleased with the look and feel. I've learned a lot about web development in the last five years. Not using a web font anymore Not using JavaScript (yet) The web font I was using before was nice,…
Prounounced like "savvy," the name SAVvie comes from our initial prototype name, "Social Argument Voting," and the verb "vie," which means to compete. We imagined it to be an online implementation of Robert's Rules of Order --- a place suitable for online debate and group decision-making . SAVvie is a team project that was jump-started during the 24-hour Southern Utah Code Camp hackathon of 2016.…
Summary To simplify the creation of complicated page layouts, I developed a new "Advanced Page" content type in our CMS. Advanced pages have automatic support for custom row-and-column layouts and pluggable, reusable, structured component blocks. {{< figure src="/images/advanced-3.png" link="/images/advanced-3.png" caption="Advanced page multi-column demo screenshot" >}} Background I work in the…
When the marketing department asked us to build a site for their newest campaign, " SUU to Everywhere ," I implemented the CMS page types and the CSS for the site's design. At the time, our site didn't really have anything like this. A coworker and I planned a way for the new code to be reusable in other areas (specifically the university news). We made structured page types for the stories so…
January 2016 -- July 2016 Falling Spikes is an iPhone game based on an idea by Scott Chapman. The player controls a bouncing ball by moving it left and right to avoid randomly falling spikes. Scott and I wanted to develop and publish this game for iOS devices with the hopes of making semi-passive income. His field is business, and mine is programming. The game took about 90 hours to create. The…
Casino Game Maker , a local startup, approached me to create a new website. The company had me develop the site online, so I believe it's public knowledge, but they never marketed the site and it is currently down. It involved large file distribution, multi-level managed user accounts, and online payments. The site had two parts: the majority of it was built using CodeIgniter, an older PHP…
Built during Southern Utah Code Camp 2014, JuxtaPros is a web app for quickly making lists of pros and cons. Jacob Ward and I came up with the idea, and we actually tried to build it for Code Camp two years in a row. The first year, we built the front end but ran out of time before we could build the back end (it didn't help that neither of us had built a back end before). The second year, we…
Three days ago, Apple gave its 2013 WWDC keynote presentation. They announced OS X Mavericks, the new Mac Pro, and a new design for iOS 7. I'm taking the opportunity to move my own development efforts forward, by creating Mindful Code. Under this name, I intend to create apps for iOS and Mac that truly understand how people think of and interact with their systems. The definition of "mindful" has…
(February 2023 update: I realized a few years ago that the person who bought Goodness just wanted to display ads to its users. It became advertising junk, and it is no longer on the Chrome Web Store.) For a long time, Goodness was my most successful project: a Chrome extension designed to block a few sites for people struggling with pornography addiction. I sold it in 2013 with about 11,000 users,…