Musings

The Stanley Parable

Have you played The Stanley Parable? I highly recommend it if you haven’t.

The Stanley Parable’s gameplay is simple. Most of the gameplay is just walking around, experiencing a somewhat dull office environment, and occasionally interacting with an object or two while a narrator (a non-playable character or NPC) narrates. The player repeats the “same” scenario again and again.

However, depending on the player’s choices and overall state of the game, the scenario will likely change in some way. Variations can include the narrator saying something different, a new opportunity or decision being available, or a different ending.

I’ve now been married to my lovely wife, Avery, for over 5 years! I’m so thankful for her and for our marriage.

We decided to throw a party in celebration of this milestone with some of our friends at our apartment in NYC. We made it more unique using a theme + technology!

I first created my blog in 2014. For the next ~10 years, it stayed the same, only adding new posts through 2017 when I lost the ability to easily make new posts (note: always save source files to the cloud). Its design held up surprisingly well!

In the last ~1.5 years CSS-Tricks has basically died and Twitter has similarly taken a blow thanks to Elon. As a result, I have tech stuff that I want to explore and post about but not a great place to post it.

Additionally, in the last ~6 months I’ve been using Svelte a lot more and I figured now’s a good time as any to rebuild my blog. I should probably redo my personal site sometime…

In this post I’ll cover some of the key changes and cool new tech that I got to use in building this blog!

Design aspects

I’ve been wanting to redesign my personal website/portfolio for the past couple of years. I had the previous version since 2014 (if not before), and only made minor updates to it. It did the job, but wasn’t really impressive like I wanted it to be in order to apply to the companies I want to work at. But I spent all my extra time working on other projects and didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to do with it until recently.

One day in class in my final semester at UGA I got a bit of inspiration to use parallelograms as a slider to show projects, so I made a quick sketch and figured I had enough skill to develop it pretty well. I made use of CSS clip-paths and got a working version of the design in code. However, the result wasn’t as impressive as I was imagining (though I still think it’s cool and could be a valid slider in the future for a different site) and it wasn’t the most usable thing I’ve made.

I’ve been part of some web developer chatrooms for ~4 years now. In order to help newcomers quickly get used to them, here are some etiquette tips:

• Keep the number of messages you post to a minimum. No one wants to read 10 separate messages that should have been one message. It fills up the chatroom and makes less content in total visible.
• If you’re requesting help, be very concise and clear, generally keeping the question of your scope very limited. This is true in all mediums, but especially true for chat. It is better for everyone, including yourself, to do so.
• Don’t update people every time you’re leaving or apologize for not responding immediately. There are exceptions, but in general people don’t expect immediate replies all of the time. Be patient when expecting others to answer and don’t flood the chat with, “be back in 2 minutes” type of comments.
• Chatrooms operate in UGT (Universal Greeting Time). Or better yet, no time at all. Don’t create a bunch of noise about the time of day when someone includes it in a message of theirs.
• Use chatroom features appropriately when they are available. If your chatroom platform supports threading, use it. If it supports editing old messages, use that for corrections and simple additions instead of creating new messages. If it has a bot, don’t abuse it by using it too much or posting content irrelevant to the chat. If it supports “pinging” people, don’t do it unless you really need to.