I’m terrible at writing consistently (I’ve thought about it a lot; I just never get to it), so here’s a summary of what’s been going on.

I made some progress on my SweetRPG project, touching on a number of areas. I wanted to make sure there was a consistent, reliable CI/CD process with unit tests, version tagging, and deployment. I wanted to use Kubernetes, so I setup a small cluster using kubeadm, and setup Flux to handle the deployments. I also setup multiple Python packages with automated build and deployment to PyPI. I also made the backend open source. But, work has stalled due to a variety of reasons.

I started exploring mod development for Minecraft and Forge. My wife and her cousin wanted a cat mod similar to Doggy Talents, so I started working on one. That’s my current diversion.

I bought a new M1 MacBook Pro, even though I think the notch is probably one of the stupidest design decisions Apple has ever made. (They’ve completely gone off the deep end: they continue to be capricious with App Review, burn developer trust, and even though they’re the most valuable company ever, continue to display greedier and greedier behavior. I’ve also let my developer program membership lapse.) I would switch back to Linux or Windows 11, but I have too much invested in this platform right now, and too much muscle memory, that I don’t want to relearn everything. Once Apple crashes and burns because of their own self-inflicted stupidity, I’ll move somewhere else.

I made another attempt to start working on a web application in Swift with Vapor. It didn’t get very far.

Apple introduces things like Property Wrappers, and the Vapor project responds by rewriting the entire framework, leaving behind work only partially done for serious web application components like JSON API, and the authors of those projects can’t keep up or lose interest.

Looks like it’s back to reliable and feature-complete Python and Flask.

If you’re a user of Initiative!, my iOS initiative tracker app, then you should know that all in-app purchase prices have been set to $0 USD. So that means that game systems and customizations are now free in the app.