This post from @jhpot.bsky.social puts words to a feeling I've had for a while. It's a weird word out there and I'm glad (or at least hopeful) we can find joy in our own ways and places. justinpot.com/whats-worth-...

It's education stipend season! Any must-have technical books or courses you'd recommend? Topics could include: General software engineering, #Python, #Rustlang, #Typescript, or anything else extra cool.

We’re very excited to announce Thinky Dailies! 🎉 Follow our thinky friend on an adventure through handcrafted daily puzzles! thinkygames.com/dail...

Advent of Code is starting soon!! I'll be doing it in Python, per usual. But probably a day or two behind. When I _do_ solve them, I'll write about each puzzle on my AoC blog. There's an RSS feed if you want to stay up to date: advent-of-code.xavd.id

Go play this! It's such a fun game and I'm excited that there'll actually be people in the queue finally.

This feels good and normal

Happy official #Pithon day to us all! It's got template strings, new interpreter options, some better error messages, and more! Big congrats to @hugovk.dev and all the #Python contributors that made this possible! mastodon.social/@xavdid/1111...

They talked about my recent TypeScript blog post in this episode. It's a cool listen!

Real life @xkcd.com 1105 sighting! xkcd.com/1105/

Wrote a little #blog post over the weekend about my favorite #TypeScript pattern: #Python kwargs! It's a great little pattern. xavd.id/blog/post/py...

#Python f-strings have a super powerful templating language built in! But I always forget the exact syntax. Well, no longer! h/t @the-compiler.org fstring.help/cheat/

If you look closely, you might recognize the byline on that article... 👀

I wrote a bit about my experience doing a bunch of Rust last year! As expected, there were good parts and less good ones. Neat language though. xavd.id/blog/post/my...

Feels like it's a good day to mention that it's pretty easy to archive your Reddit data for safekeeping

A new #AdventOfCode solution? In #python? It's more likely than you think. Here's 2024 day 16! I'll finish these yet. advent-of-code.xavd.id/writeups/202...

PSA: It's both Bandcamp Friday AND there's a new 8-Bit Big Band album out!! album.link/i/1813061416 It's available on streaming, but some stuff is fun to own. Plus you can support them financially!

I'm a software guy by trade, so it's always exciting to fix a household item by taking it apart. Pictured is my venerated #Kobo, who reset itself and refused to connect to WiFi or a computer after being left unattended for a year. Popped it open, got the SD card in my computer, and restored it!

Latest review is up! It's from one of my favorite studios, so no real surprise- it was a slam dunk!

Happy #Vantage launch day to all who celebrate #boardgames

Fun fact: As of today, we are now closer to 2050 than we are to 2000.

🕹️🎮 At long last, @vicky.science and I have BLOOPED THAT RINSE (aka we finished BLUE PRINCE). The game is massive and tricky and oh so tightly designed. Makes for great couch "co-op" where we're both working together to solve things! david.reviews/games/blue-p...

I did a lot of writing over the weekend! First up, I published a personal blog post all about my computer backup strategy (such that it is). Thinking through what you care about and how to back it up is a great exercise if you haven't done it before. xavd.id/blog/post/my...

PSA: New Dispatch album dropped last week! www.dispatchmusic.com/music/yellow...

Great news! The team behind the Steam version of @roottrees.com have announced their second game: a remaster of the freeware deduction game TYPE HELP! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3641000/The_Incident_at_Galley_House/

The demo for Kaizen: A Factory Story is now live on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/2275490 This is the first demo that I have made for one of our games since... 2011? I've been operating under the assumption that Bulletstorm killed the PC game demo, but apparently that's not true anymore.

The Caltrain app needs a disclaimer if there's a Giants home game when you're checking the timetables. I always forget to do it myself and am always surprised when I get on a totally packed 11:30am train

Lyft first: driver is listening to an audiobook. Little odd, but NBD. Come to realize it's not a full book, it's the first 5 minutes of _many_ audiobooks (presumably a continuous stream of free previews). This... is much worse.

Our friends over at Thinky are hosting their first "Direct"! It'll feature tons of puzzle game announcements, trailers, demo releases, and more. Be sure to tune in!

This is an interesting thread about culverts and flood damage!

Work post! I'm running a survey of #Stripe users who handle events (webhooks) from Stripe. We're working on the SDK+Webhook experience and we'd love to get some feedback! forms.gle/sqoMbCoxe5wy...

If anyone is looking for something to watch over the Easter weekend, check out the video on youtube that I watched a few years ago. Can't remember what it was called but it was very informative and made a lot of thought-provoking points. Hopefully it's still on there.

I'm not sure how I missed this, but Streetlight Manifesto has NEW ALBUM coming out this summer!! July 24th!! I don't know what to do with my hands!! #music #ska

Truly fascinating line in a job description I was sent recently.

I pushed an update to my review site today that improves the review card layout on mobile! Those cards were the very first things I designed for the site. I wanted them to have a nice, clean layout. For code simplicity, I went with a single layout that shrunk gracefully, but suboptimally. 1/5

This was such a fun event! Awesome getting to meet folks.

PEOPLE OF BLUESKY! Ahhhhhh, it smells good here. Behold a trailer for season 2 of Poker Face! It’s gonna be a good one. May 8th on the almighty Peacock!

Had the recent honor of answering some pressing whale questions with @drthinglearner.bsky.social of the kids' podcast Moment of Um! I love a good hypothetical journey. Listen here for a chill break from whichever of the current Things is on your mind. www.momentofum.org/episode/2025...

As our #England / #Scotland trip draws to a close, it's been fun to look back at the culture shock moments. 1/

Jet lag is so wild. Flew east. Slelpt a little on the overnight flight event though that felt like napping from 11pm-2am. Landed, powered through the day. Passed out at 10pm, WIDE awake at 4am, tired again for alarm at 9am. None of these correlate to home times well. Anyway, hello London!

"Why do you use an ad-blocker?" Because I don't hate myself?

The more I use Bluesky, the more I think it's a mistake to make the clients handle all of the message formatting (instead of the server). It means you have a ton of control over post presentation, but it also means every client produces different output. It's wildly frustrating.

I got a chance to play a bunch of the @thinkygames.com awards nominees! They're each very cool in their own way. I wrote up some quick impressions:

My dude @xavd.id keeps meticulous records of the media he consumes and picks his favorite things to talk about at the end of every year (nine years running)! We do not share all of these opinions but many of them are good anyways. If you're interested: xavd.id/blog/post/fa...

When you think about it, Venmo is just a social network where it costs money to post.

@nick.scialli.me loved the blog post about govsky! Very cool project and a good level of technical detail. I also love running my projects as cheaply as possible. I run all of david.reviews on a free netlify account and Airtable.

This is a great game and a fascinating technical writeup!

This year's nominees for the @thinkygames.com awards are here! I've been selected as a juror and have having a blast playing all the nominees (even if it's melting my brain a little). There are some real winners in here though! thinkygames.com/awards/

🧑‍💻 Rare opportunity alert: Panic is looking for a Web Services Engineer to maintain and expand our growing flock of Flask + Django web applications, and more. The job is here in Portland, OR. (We can also cover USA relocation.) Is this you? Or someone you know? Apply! (Or share!) 🙏 panic.com/jobs/

I've started building the GoBikeCamping mobile app, which will allow for offline use of the map! If you're interested in beta testing the iOS version in a few weeks DM me your email.

Well folks, it's here! My massive Favorite Media of 2024 roundup is live! I've got #videogames, #movies, #tv, and #books, plus links to everything that was eligible from last calendar year. As always, it's a big one, but I think it turned out well. Enjoy! xavd.id/blog/post/fa...