woodardj

Normally, when I’m leading an engineering team, or consulting for one, I’m always firmly in the camp of avoiding a full re-write of your codebase. If you’ve got a functioning product, and customers, you just can’t press pause on development there, leaving current customers without bug fixes or improvements while the team spends 6-12 months rewriting everything from scratch… But I digress. Luckily(!?) in this case I don’t have a functional system or any existing customers… just a dusty codebase. In fact, I did a little infrastructural work this weekend, just trying to power some things on, I got a warning that a component I was using was deprecated… not that uncommon, generally, but this deprecation warning was SO OLD that the component it was recommending I upgrade to HAS ALSO SINCE BEEN DEPRECATED. That’s how old it is ????

(Cue joke about Arthur in Hitchhiker’s Guide searching for files in a disused lavatory)

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Kicking offRead More »

Twelve years ago, I was frustrated with the technology we were using at work, and I set out to learn something else that I’d been hearing about, and wanted to try, Django. Nothing guides a learning project like a target, so I set out to build a game in the style of the old classics Master of Orion, or more specifically Pax Imperia (for us Mac nerds), but generally a web-based multiplayer “eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate” (4X) style game. In fact, the original title, before I settled on a name was fourx

So, bit at a time, I built up what I needed to make this happen — learning each piece of the framework as I needed it, and each, successively more complex need for the game lead to incrementally covering most of the framework.

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Dawn of RailsRead More »