~audiodude is Travis Briggs, who has a bunch of web projects and a bunch of code projects.
He also makes music professionally as Danger Third Rail and shares demos of his songs online, all while talking in the third person.
At some point, he set out rules for this tildesite. Let's all look and see if he's following them!
So remember when I did all that work to make it easy to edit the wiki? And I told everyone that they could just email me their wiki pages? Well apparently I forgot about that and disappeared off the face of the tildeverse almost immediately after making that post. I'm so sorry to those who emailed me articles (and there were a couple! -- or at least one).
I've posted the article I found in my email to the wiki now, so it should go live whenever the wiki next gets pulled (which I thought was automatic, but who knows...).
Otherwise, the whole reason I'm back is because someone sent me an email at my personal addresss saying they found me on tilde.club and I was like, damn how is tilde.club doing?
Cheers!
So tilde.club has a wiki! And I recently saw a post on the mailing list about how it could possibly be improved. The three points mentioned were:
You may notice that the actionable items on that list are links. Those are links to the github pull requests where I fixed those issues! I don't know, I just felt like, okay this is a web app of some sort, I know web app programming, might as well give it a try right? Though no one told me that I'd have to write PHP...
Anyways, it was kind of fun to write this code and help out, and a big thanks to ~deepend and ~benharri for quickly merging my changes! Now I'm thinking about adding content to the wiki, a deep dive into the guts of the wiki software. If you have a topic you'd like to contribute, you should!
Just in case anyone was paying attention, it's been a long time since my last post on this site. I just wanted to be clear: no, it's not because I've been playing Factorio all this time. Though I've certainly had my opportunities. One friend that I was playing with has now logged over 400 hours. I myself capped off at about 160. And yes I finally launched the rocket.
No I don't have an excuse, or even an explanation, for my extended time away from tildeland. But I'm back, it seems. I'll explain some of my latest exploits in the next post.
I've got a new full time job. Except I don't get paid for it. If that sounds a little strange, you should know that the new "job" is the game Factorio (YouTube - Wikipedia - official wiki). I've played 40+ hours in the past 7 days, including two monster 10+ hour gaming sessions over last weekend. I have fallen down a Factorio black hole and can't get out of it. When I close my eyes right now I see little conveyer belts pushing items around. And I still haven't launched the damn rocket!
I did discover a project that allows you to use AWS CloudFormation to launch a Factorio headless Linux server that you and your friends can easily play on, with just one click. And the latency between us and the headless server was somehow better than when one of us was hosting on a laptop on a LAN, if you can believe it.
That project is based on the public Factorio docker images. which can also be used to easily set up a Factorio headless server in the cloud. The key to the CloudFormation version is that it uses so-caled "spot" instances, which can be as cheap as $0.01 per hour. Our current bid on our Factorio server is $0.05 and that's high enough that we haven't been shut down yet. If the server does get shut down, the CloudFormation tries to get it back up as soon as possible, and your save data is saved on a separate persistent Cloud Storage volume that sticks around even when the EC2 goes down. So with autosaves every minute, you lose at most one minute of progress. Did I mention we're paying 1 cent per hour for this, so it's about $7.30 a month if we kept it on all the time. We can also manually turn it off and on when we're not using it, for even more savings.
Anyways, if anyone on tilde.club wants to play on a multiplayer server, I'd be more than happy to set up a new instance and map! I'll send out an email to the mailing list with that proposal, and link to this blog post. Feel free to email me at audiodude@tilde.club if you're interested!
Over the weekend, I was cleaning up some old projects and I accidentally took down the email server that held my public email address, travis@travisbriggs.com. That email was linked to the website, travisbriggs.com, which I consider more of an entry point into my digital world than my "personal site", "personal homepage" or anything like that. Luckily the website didn't go down because it is hosted on Netlify (which is amazing BTW).
But the email server definitely went down. And my first thought was: I have to update my email on my site. But when I looked at the site, I kind of felt like it was not the best representation of myself, and that I could vastly simplify as well as update the content.
I actually clicked on Github on the list of Rails contributors to see what those folks had for their webpages. I got a bit of inspiration and started coding something new, copying the basic information hierarchy from my existing site, but expanding some sections. The result is currently hosted at: beta.travisbriggs.com
I'm going to add more content and some more interesting styling, probably at least one or two stock images or some other image for visual pop, but this is the basic idea of what I'm going for. If you have any feedback you can email me at what was my private, but is now my public, email: audiodude@gmail.com
So much for posting every day! I've saw the Google Flutter Create competition results and it definitely did its job. That is to say, it made me interested in trying to code a mobile app with Flutter.
I've never actually written a mobile app before, but I think Flutter would give me the tools to do so, which is exciting. I started writing a poker game in the web version of React, with the eventual goal of moving it to React Native, but I never really got started on the React Native part. Also I ended up using Web Sockets for the app, so I'm not even sure if that translates at all to a mobile client. Need to do the research on that one.
Here is something I made when I was trying to learn Adobe Illustrator:
I'm kind of thinking that the easiest, and perhaps most interesting, thing to put here would in fact be a blog of sorts. Just a list of chronological entries with musings, links, facts. That's a blog alright.
I once, in an answer to a Quora question about working at Google, said that you either get a small role on something big (like the YouTube Watch page) or a big role on something small (like some adtech no one's ever heard of). I'm starting to think that this is true for things like open source projects and perhaps even art projects outside of work. Like if I contribute to Rails core, that's a big project. A ton of people use it. But I will be one of literally thousands of contributors. Not only that, how big a change will they reasonably let me make?
Now think of something like my own Rainfall project to help people upload songs and deploy a static site that plays back those songs (https://github.com/audiodude/rainfall-frontend). I have 100% of the impact on that project, but no one has ever heard of it or cares.
The conclusion that seems obvious is that you want to pull both levers. You want to have a medium impact on a project that has a medium scope or number of users. That's the sweet spot, and something I'm still looking for.
Today I am setting up my tilde.club page (hint: you are here). I've decided to set up some rules for myself before setting out to make whatever it is I'm going to make. They follow below.
[1]: [obsolete].
[2]: This is done as an exercise in minimalism and simplicity, as well as an homage to earlier times when websites couldn't just be create-fancy-app'd and npn install crazy-widget'd. This also means that until I set up some kind of staging area for index.html updates, I might be live-coding index.html and saving it even when there are incomplete/unclosed/unfinished and downright broken tags and sections. Note to self: get a staging area. It's as simple as index2.html and $ cp index2.html index.html
