Projects
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Local Firebase, or, how I learned to stop trashing my prod db
Noodle has a lot of the hallmarks of a solo dev side project, which is fair, because it is. Stupid simple deploy pipeline (which is probably a good thing), no tests to speak of (probably not a good thing), no real dev environment. That means when I test Noodle locally I hook up to the prod Firebase db, and usually end up writing a lot of bogus data to it along the lines of:
- “test event”
- “test event 2”
- “asfdkf;;; why wont you work”
and so on. This isn’t really a problem, as Firebase lets me have a GB of data before I have to start paying them – that is a lot of JSON – but it’s kinda messy. And now that I’m converting Noodle to Typescript, I’m doing a lot of testing.
Enter the Firebase Emulator Suite. I got it set up so I can run a local copy of my database on my machine and not worry about junk data polluting the real database.
Here’s how I did it.
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Typescript-ifying Noodle
Over the spring and summer, I built Noodle, a minimalist, privacy-focused event scheduling app. (more) My friends and I use it all the time, but development has kinda slowed.
This is a problem, because if I ever need to fix anything, I’m going to have to go back and remember how the code works, from scratch.
Javascript is so permissive. It’s great that I can get up and running without having to worry about whether I’m comparing a string to an int, but future me is going to step on that rake, I know it.
Separately from the conversation I’m having with myself about how to ensure code maintainability without having to remember why I made all the decisions I did, my mentor at work suggested converting the project to Typescript. So that’s two people telling me to do this, so here we are.
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Game Off Results
2048 Invaders got 190th out of over 600 entries in the Github Game Off. This is far better than I expected for a silly Javascript game, my first game ever. I’m thrilled :)
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Hello, Electron
I mentioned that I wanted to experiment with packaging 2048-invaders as an Electron app to see if it improved performance. Turns out, Electron is easy (and awesome)!
There are a ton of very opinionated templates out there to turn a Phaser game into an Electron app. I experimented with a few of them, but they all did more than I needed and seemed to require far more configuration than I wanted to deal with. It’s just a silly space shooter!
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Hello, world
First post, first time using Jekyll!
I’m really liking it so far. It feels a lot like building a website in the “old days”–the real old days of just HTML. You just write a thing, and poof, it appears.