You close one door, and open another
Wow, hello world! Welcome to my first mailing list issue.
Time off
The last month (and a half) was a huge amount of change. The month started with my final day at Artsy, where I had worked for 8 years. I switched out to about a month of time off between jobs, and this week was my first at Microsoft.
Leaving Artsy was a tricky call, but definitely feels good now. I will likely have a very long writeup on the semantics of why, but it was feeling like time for me - the company was maturing and that started to feel like less of a place I could do my best work.
I'm not really one for taking time off, so what did I do with my time?
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I watched all The Wire again. Last time I watched it, I wasn't in the greatest spot, so I feel like I could really appreciate it this time.
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I took LSD a few times. After reading How to Change Your Mind, I've been working my way through a bunch of psychedelics. I wanted to use them to try reflect on life/ideas/who-am-i, and to chill out. The reflection stuff didn't really work out, but I did have a really good few hours watching YouTube each time! I'd recommend it, but I think it's over-hyped by the media to be more than it is, maybe I just need to have stronger doses though.
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I built a game with my friends Em Lazer-Walker and Zach Gage
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I wanted to create a new blog to write on, but once the game got started I really wanted to just focus on that for a whole time. Shame, feels kinda weird going a whole month without writing anything publicly.
NY
Me and Danger are moving to Brookyln at the end of this month, our current apartment state is a bit problematic with the land-lord not signing our lease because the broker for his side wrote us a lease saying we can have a dog. It's not that real-estate has a good reputation in NYC, but this move was particularly shitty.
I'm not too excited to move. I love the area we live (Lower East Side) and will be sad to leave it and the people nearby. I am pumped to have space though. We're currently used to 2 smallish rooms, so moving to a larger place means we can foster a dog again, and I can make a real office at home. I'd like to start streaming my programming again, which should be feasible given most of my work will be public.
Microsoft
To quote a chat from today "Microsoft? That came outta nowhere?!" - it's been cool seeing from the inside how much internal messaging has been "Microsoft has changed." The company re-evaluated it's path and interactions with the rest of the world back in 2014. That seemed to really start happening with Satya Nadella as the new CEO, who encouraged a lot of the kind of culture which Artsy was famous for.
From my perspective, Microsoft started to become interesting after starting to really adopt Open Source as a principle. I saw things like Microsoft joining the Linux Foundation, then started seeing world-class tools being created for everyone like VS Code and TypeScript.
Why TypeScript? Well, I have a longer write up for that. Roughly, it's the right project at the right time trying to help a large community in a way I really agree with.
That Game
We're starting to get to a point where people can try this, so this is the first public mention of it. I've been working on a really cool game. It mixes Flappy Bird with Fortnite. Basically you play Flappy Bird against ~100 folks. It's got the difficulty of Flappy Bird mixed with the tension of a battle royale style game. Your characters have all sorts of stylistic choices, and it is crazy messy to play.
We've been calling it Flappy Royale.
There are two ways to play:
- Royale, basically a free for all.
- Daily Trail, basically a best-of where you play against the top scores for that day with limited lives.
I love how a round starts, you're chilling in your bus till you jump off
Then over time all these players start hitting pipes or the floor, knocking them out
Till eventually there's just a few of you left. Hah.
Here's a work-in-progress videos.
Now that a lot of the main game and polish is close to done, a lot of it the work is now feedback and marketing etc. I enjoy that kinda stuff, so should be a fun month. We've been focusing on iOS, but there's a working android and web build too. It's been fun, and mainly consumed all my open source time. So there's been very little on that front.