Definitely give Ruthless a go, I love it… reminds me of early game ARPG’s on higher difficulties. Positioning really matters, you have to adapt based on what you get. It seems to have been the proving ground for PoE2’s new tempo.

I was going to do an origin character as a solo play-through and a custom character for a group play-through with my mates, but now I might do it the other way around… which means hours in the character creator! Ha.

I’ve been there. My mum struggled to communicate with me when I was in that period of my life, and so she’d buy me various books that she thought - sometimes through title alone - would get through to me. Almost all didn’t. Almost. One did.

Now, I will recommend the book of course, and more, but that’s not the message I want to give you. We’re all different, we’ve all got into this differently, and we all get out of it differently - what started things rolling for me may well do nothing for you. My message more is that the answer is within you, you just can’t see it - it’s hidden from you through no fault of your own; but with the right nudge, the right spark, and you’ll start to see a way out - so dim at first you scarcely recognise it for what it is, but it’ll nag at you, pique your interest, and slowly, ever-so-slowly, the snowball begins to roll.

Form me, the book was The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse.

I firmly believe that it’s no co-incidence that this book connected with me, it is astonishingly well crafted, the author is a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and several of his books, including The Glass Bead Game, “explores an individual’s search for authenticity, self-knowledge and spirituality.” Reading it is a journey - it takes it’s time to get hold of you, presumably with different elements appealing to different people, then it starts to lead you down a very carefully crafted but almost invisible path to a self-realisation.

A modern author, Matt Haig, wasn’t on my radar when I suffered from depression, but he is a somewhat unusual author in that he writes self-help books and novels. His most famous book The Midnight Library is particularly good, and it was a page-turning read, though I’ve not yet read any of his other titles.

Finally, we’re getting into books that have nothing to do with self-help directly, but I think are just straight-up amazing and recommend them to everyone, but they’re inspirational too:

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss is the first book in The Kingkiller Chronicle’s, of which there are currently only two out of the three books at this time - so you will be left hanging, as we all have been for years - but it’s so very definitely worth it.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card is a book that spawned a series referred to as the Ender’s Saga or Enderiverse - it’s brillant on its own, but I highly recommend reading Ender’s Shadow too as it really adds to the first book in an unexpected way.

The author Kazuo Ishiguro is a phenomenal writer and also a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books are very diverse, but from my experience so far (I’m not finished reading them all) they have something in common to Hermann Hesse’s books; they carefully take hold of you and pull you down a very carefully constructed path that you can barely see, but you feel like you’ve found the way rather than been led there as you must have been! The Remains of the Day is a period drama, not my cup of tea at all normally, but is brilliant and is so well written it made me realise I’d been missing out reading so much pulp sci-fi/fantasy! Another pick is Klara and the Sun, a sci-fi book set from the perspective of an android, which is incredibly well written and manages to shift your perspective on the story so much with so few words.

And so onto my final recommendation, of where to buy cheap books, but I’m going to be sneaky and tell the story of how my search for cheap books helped me overcome my depression.

Charity shops, aka thrift stores, are great for cheap second-hand books - most places will sell them for less than you can find them online - you just might have to do some hunting and regular visits to find them. Now, depending on where in the world you are, they may or may not exist. If they don’t, find out what happens to used books in your country and hunt them out there… it could be church fund-raisers, libraries, etc. But the act of actually browsing all the books and hunting for something new to read is a great activity in and of itself, if you set the goal that you’ll come back with something new no matter what!

But it was while looking at used books in a local charity shop that I realised they were looking for volunteers. So I started volunteering. At first I just stayed in the back listing books for sale online. Then I was convinced to help someone on the till, then asked to look after the till, then the shop, then eventually a paid position came up and I applied for it and got it.

I didn’t know it then, but that act of volunteering truly set me on my path to wellness. Initially I thought it was because of the objective good I was doing in the world, which would make sense - but looking back it wasn’t that at all. It was a more immediate sense of purpose, of socialising, of talking to people and listening to their problems, of getting social cues wildly wrong and learning, and so on. I was in full control of the rate of social interaction, but they always pushed me that touch more - with encouragement, kindness, and support.

Then one day I realised something strange - I was doing small-talk without thinking. It was almost terrifying, thinking back that I’ve literally just said something I’d not explicitly thought. But then it dawned on me… for the first time in over 20 years, I’d just been myself for a fleeting moment - free from worry and free from over-thinking; no conscious thought process martialling my thoughts and speech. It was in that realisation I knew for sure I’d eventually be OK. It took a long time, many years, and there were some bumps - but my rise to good health was inexorable.

Then the crazy part comes… dealing with emotions again! It had been so long since I last properly felt them, outside of expressing all emotions through negative emotions (i.e. I love my brother so much I would do X if someone did something to him"). I’d say I was actually manic for a while, having really high highs more powerful than the best drugs I’ve ever taken, and really low lows where I thought I was back at the start again. But having since seen my young nephews grow up, I realise now it was just learning how to deal with emotions again. It’s a wild ride, but one to be excited about and look forward to, not fear.

Another element that I really struggled with and slowed my progress was “blame”. Who’s fault was it I was like this? Mine? My parents? This event? That experience? It tore me up for a long time, there’s one thing worse than blaming yourself, and that’s blaming those you love. But over the years I came to see that it was a perfect storm, multiple overlapping waves that in isolation would have been tough but fine, but altogether at just the wrong times, sunk the ship. It was nobody’s fault that all these waves came at just the wrong times, that was chance.

So my advice is to read some of these great books and those others suggest, get involved with your community - there’s so many great causes desperate for your help, and set yourself on the path to find that first glimpse of the dim spark that will inexorably lead to your good health. You might not find it in days, weeks, or even months - but if you keep looking, even after a long break, you will eventually find it.

Good luck!

EDIT: Just to say, the Ender’s Game audiobook is amazing - tons of 80’s sci-fi sound effects!

If I’m okay with the software (not just trying it out) am I missing out by not using dockers?

No, I think in your use case you’re good. A lot of the key features of containers, such as immutability, reproduceability, scaling, portability, etc. don’t really apply to your use case.

If you reach a point where you find you want a stand-alone linux server, or an auto-reconfiguring reverse proxy to map domains to your services, or something like that - then it starts to have some additional benefit and I’d recommend it.

In fact, using native builds of this software on Windows is probably much more performant.

Containers can be based on operating systems that are different to your computer.

Containers utilise the host’s kernel - which is why there needs to be some hoops to run Linux container on Windows (VM/WSL).

That’s one of the most key differences between VMs and containers. VMs virtualise all the hardware, so you can have a totally different guest and host operating systems; whereas because a container is using the host kernel, it must use the same kind of operating system and accesses the host’s hardware through the kernel.

The big advantage of that approach, over VMs, is that containers are much more lightweight and performant because they don’t have a virtual kernel/hardware/etc. I find its best to think of them as a process wrapper, kind of like chroot for a specific application - you’re just giving the application you’re running a box to run in - but the host OS is still doing the heavy lifting.

I was using file merging, but one issue I found was that arrays don’t get merged - and since switching to use Traefik (which is great) there are a lot of arrays in the config! And I’ve since started using labels for my own tooling too.

I was recently helping someone working on a mini-project to do a bit of parsing of docker compose files, when I discovered that the docker compose spec is published as JSON Schema here.

I converted that into TypeScript types using JSON Schema to TypeScript. So I can create docker compose config in code and then just export it as yaml - I have a build/deploy script that does this at the end.

But now the great thing is that I can export/import that config, share it between projects, extend configs, mix-in, and so on. I’ve just started doing it and it’s been really nice so far, when I get a chance and it’s stabilised a bit I’m going to tidy it up and share it. But there’s not much I’ve added beyond the above at the moment (just some bits to mix-in arrays, which was what set me off on this whole thing!)

I just have a static page that I randomly change - you can see mine here. In this case I was testing the idea of having text within an SVG for better scaling from mobile to desktop, and also I’m loving orange and purple at the moment for some reason! Oh, and I was testing automated deployments from CI/CD, so I always use my own base domain with those first tests!

Are there any good alternatives?

We’ve started using Jitsi for video/screen-sharing and that’s going well so far - but it’s based very much around the “corporate meeting” concept, rather than “playing D&D with mates” or “online gaming with people”.

Mumble is decent enough for voice comms, but of course lacks video, which for my friend group is a deal-breaker. While the audio quality is noticably better most of the time, its noise suppression is not as good as Discord. It does have text chat, but lacks the utility of Discord’s chat - which we use in D&D for sharing information, images, note-taking, etc.

Things do game tracking/voice like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, etc. but then each only supports their own platforms and services - whereas Discord is common to all.

I think what DIscord does well is bring together a few really established, tried and tested technologies, under one roof and integrates them seamlessly. There is definitely value in that, and I would be really interested in an open source/self-hosted equivalent.

My main concerns with Discord are:

1. They inevitably ramp up income earning opportunities and therefore eventually compromise the system.
2. It can’t be catalogued/searched easily.
3. It seems like a near-perfect platform for harvesting data for ML (and the platform has some traction with the ML community already).

“Out of the frying pan, into the fire”

From a personal perspective, I absolutely agree - I only check my email when I’m specifically expecting something, which is rarely. But at work emails are still incredibly important.

Are there any protocols/services designed specifically for one time codes? Receipts? I think something that’s dedicated to those kinds of tasks would be great from an ease-of-use perspective - no more messing about waiting for delivery, searching through hordes of emails, checking spam folder, etc.

Another problem we have is the rise of oauth - the core idea is great, but the reality is that it ties a lot of people to these Big Tech services.

Glad you sorted it though! It’s a nightmare when you get such an opaque error and there’s so many moving parts that could be responsible!

Assume nothing! Test every little assumption and you’ll find the problem. Some things to get you started:

• Does the “app” domain resolve to the app container’s IP from within the nginx container?
• Can you proxy_pass to the host:port directly rather than using an upstream definition? If not, what about IP:port?
• Can you connect to the app container from outside (if exposed)? What about from inside the nginx container? What about inside the app container?
• Is the http(s) connection to the server (demo.example.com) actually going to your nginx instance? Shut it down and see if it changes.
• If it works locally on 80, can you get it to work on the VPS on 80?
• Are you using the exact same docker-compose.yaml file for this as locally? If not, what’s different?
• Are you building the image? If so, are you incrementing the version number of the build so it gets updated?
• Is there a firewall running on the host OS? If so, is it somehow interfering? Disable it and see.

While not a direct solution to your problem, I no longer manually configure my reverse proxies at all now and use auto-configuring ones instead. The nginx-proxy image is great, along with it’s ACME companion image for automatic SSL cert generation with certbot - you’ll be up and running in under 30 mins. I used that for a long time and it was great.

I’ve since moved to using Traefik as it’s more flexible and offers more features, but it’s a bit more involved to configure (simple, but the additional flexibility means everything requires more config).

That way you just bring up your container and the reverse proxy pulls meta-data from it (e.g. host to map/certbot email) and off it goes.

I use it for basic 2D animation - overlays for videos (captions, title sequences, etc.) and animated diagrams - it works really well when you get used to it (mastering the curves editor is essential!). If you’re going to composite what you do onto video outside of Blender (I use Resolve) you need to export as an image sequence in a format that supports transparency (e.g. png).

For more complex 2D work, Marco Bucci has an interesting three-part series here (the third part goes over animation specifically).

I think after Dawn of War III, caution is the key! But yes, this is certainly one to watch!

Same - for Windows it’s by far and away the best PDF reader for me. It’s shocking how far down the bloat rabbit hole Adobe Reader has gone!

In the original XCOM my brother and I didn’t realise you needed to collect and research everything. We thought it was like a horde-survival game, however it could infact be completed. Learning this years after starting to play was one of my best gaming experiences - I came back to my parents for the weekend just to blow my brother’s mind!

The issues with LLM’s for coding are numerous - they don’t produce good results in my experience, there’s plenty of articles on their flaws.

But… they do highlight something very important that I think we as developers have been guilty of for decades… a large chunk of what we do is busy work; the model definitions, the api to wrap the model, the endpoint to expose the model, the client to connect to the endpoint, the ui that links to the client, the server-side validation, the client-side validation, etc. On and on… so much of it is just busy work. No wonder LLM’s can offer up solutions to these things so easily - we’ve all been re-inventing the wheel over and over and over again.

Busy work is the worst and it played a big part in why I took a decade-long break from professional software development. But now I’m back running my own business and I’m spending significant time reducing busy work - for profit but also for my own personal enjoyment of doing the work.

I have two primary high-level goals:

1. Maximise reuse - As much as possible should be re-usable both within and between projects.
2. Minimise definition - I should only use the minimum definition possible to provide the desired solution.

When you look at projects with these in mind, you realise that so many “fundamentals” of software development are terrible and inherently lead to busy work.

I’ll give a simple example… let’s say I have the following definition for a model of a simple blog:

User:
  id: int generate primary-key
  name: string

Post:
  id: int generate primary-key
  user_id: int foreign-key(User.id)
  title: string
  body: string

Seems fairly straight-forward, we’ve all done this before - it can be in SQL, prisma, etc. But there’s some fundamental flaws right here:

1. We’ve tightly coupled Post to User through the user_id field. That means Post is instantly far less reusable.
2. We’ve forced an id scheme that might not be appropriate for different solutions - for example a blogging site with millions of bloggers with a distributed database backend may prefer bigint or even some form of UUID.
3. This isn’t true for everything, but is for things like SQL, Prisma, etc. - we’ve defined the model in a data-definition language that doesn’t support many reusability features like importing, extending, mixins, overriding, etc.
4. We’re going to have to define this model again in multiple places… our API that wraps the database, any clients that consume that API, any endpoints that serve that API up, in the UI, the validation, and so on.

Now this is just a really simple, almost superficial example - but even then it highlights these problems.

So I’m working on a “pattern” to help solve these kinds of problems, but with a reference implementation in TypeScript. Let’s look at the same example above in my reference implementation:

export const user = new Entity({
    name: "User",
    fields: [
        new NameField(),
    ],
});

export const post = new Entity({
    name: "Post",
    fields: [
        new NameField("title", { maxLength: 100 }),
        new TextField("body"),
    ],
});

export const userPosts = new ContentCreator({
    name: "UserPosts",
    author: user,
    content: post,
});

export const blogSchema = new Schema({
    relationships: [
        userPosts,
    ],
});

So there’s several things to note:

1. Entities are defined in isolation without coupling to each other.
2. We have sane defaults, no need to specify an id field for each entity (though you can).
3. You can’t see it here because of the above, but there are abstract id field definitions: IDField and AutoIDField. It’s the specific implementation of this schema where you specify the type of ID you want to use, e.g. IntField, BigIntField, UUIDField, etc.
4. Relationships are defined separately and used to link together entities.
5. Relationships can bestow meaning - the ContentCreator relationship just extends OneToMany, but adds meta-data from which we can infer things in our UI, authorization, etc.
6. Fields can be extended to provide meaning and to abstract implementations - for example the NameField extends TextField, but adds meta-data so we know it’s the name of this entity, and that it’s unique, so we can therefore have UI that uses that for links to this entity, or use it for a slug, etc.
7. Everything is a separately exported variable which can be imported into any project, extended, overridden, mixed in, etc.
8. When defining the relationship we sane defaults are used so we don’t need to explicitly define the entity fields we’re using to make the link, though we can if we want.
9. We don’t need to explicitly add both our entities and relationships to our schema (though we can) as we can infer the entities from the relationships.

There is another layer beyond this, which is where you define an Application which then lets you specify code generation components that to do all the busy work for you, settings like the ID scheme you want to use, etc.

It’s early days, I’m still refining things, and there is a ton of work yet to do - but I am now using it in anger on commercial projects and it’s saving me time - generating types/interfaces/classes, database definitions, api’s, end points, ui components, etc.

But it’s less about this specific implementation and more about the core idea - can we maximise reuse and minimise what we need to define for a given solution?

There’s so many things that come off the back of it - so much config that isn’t reusable (e.g. docker compose files), so many things that can be automatically determined based on data (e.g. database optimisations), so many things that can be abstracted (e.g. deployment/scaling strategies).

So much busy work that needs to be eliminated, allowing us to give LLM’s a run for their money!

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Somewhat randomly I read The Remains of the Day a little while back and loved it, even though it’s entirely unlike the stories I usually read.

I’m really enjoying Klara and the Sun too - in-particular I’m enjoying how the story has these quite sharp shifts in where you think the story is going, but they’re just dropped casually, almost as a throw-away line, and you’re left thinking about the huge implications of so few words.

I also just love Ishiguro’s writing style and creativity - it’s like he’s painting a picture with black on white, and that picture is great - but the white space forms a picture too, and with that he adds so much more.

With each story he’s setting out to take you on a specific emotional journey, but he’s not holding your hand and showing you so much as guiding you with as little effort as possible such that when you get there, you feel like you got there on your own, and so it hits so much harder as a result - even though he very carefully led you. It’s hard to describe! But it’s amazing, I’d be surprised if I’ve not read everything of his soon!