Recently with my career, health has become a thing I’ve been a lot more conscious of. Physical, mental, etc. So I’ve made the decision to move to 3 days per week, leaving Thursday and Friday available to me for health care and rest.
I’d like to eventually transition to a career in which I can work more independently as well, and the career options are pretty simple:
- Come up with a product – build and sell it (SaaS, etc.)
- Come up with a service – promote and sell said services (Contracting, etc.)
I have a couple of projects and things that I do which fall into the second category – I do some web hosting and consulting on the side, which produce some income for me. So I feel like I could certainly return to pushing those paths a bit more if need be.
Games are a passion project…
– me, now.
However, I’ve always wanted to build a game. Since I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES back in the 90s, all the way through my adult life – I’ve always been a gamer.
In my mind, games aren’t something you build to make money – sure there’s that one in a million opportunity to build a Minecraft, or the next World of Warcraft. But that’s both extremely rare, and extremely difficult to achieve. Games are a passion project, and if you’re lucky, you get a financial reward if you find something that strikes a chord with the gamers who try your game out.
I’m at a stage in my career where I can afford one last hurrah at a passion project beyond the gaming events and marketing adventures of yesteryear.
Time to give it a go!
Do you have a plan?
I’m not quite sure about the games I’d like to make yet. But I think the plan is to build:
- Some basic indie games to learn games development, and;
- learn some basic art creation (2D – Aseprite, 3D – Blender) to flesh out said games, and;
In terms of sound creation and audio design – I may just leave to 3rd parties, if I’m honest – Audio is always and will forever be a dark magic for me
Okay…
So why am I blogging here about something I haven’t even started?
To keep myself publicly accountable. I’ve already told my mates on Discord, now I have to just execute 😂
Welcome Maple. I don’t know what type of cat or kitten she is. But she’s 2 years old, and gorgeous. She’s Panko’s big sister.
She’s a tiny kitty, so here’s hoping that she and Panko get along, and he’s gentle 🙂
I’m sure she’ll very quickly establish that she’s in charge, though.
So, it’s no secret that I’m very much into PC gaming; and with it, the hobby of essentially running LAN parties or gaming communities.
Recently, with the growth of the pandemic, I’d been able to grow my own little community to about 120-odd people on Discord. There’s a core group of about 15-16 of us that play games together, and the rest sort of float in and out of discussions and various gaming releases.
September’s been a pretty crazy period; and I’ve started taking stock of the hobby I call “Only Snacks” and gaming. Not only is it a gaming community of close friends and family, it also ties into an enterprise level server rack, and internet connection. Granted I get benefits out of it in terms of business and capabilities; but it opens doors for our small group that didn’t exist before.
It’s pretty expensive. I don’t mind, there are others out there with wackier and (far) more expensive passions. I’m still within my means, but I did note today that it eats up almost all my time and energy.
The group is something I consider close friends – and among them a circle that I’d consider family. They honestly saw me through a rough time (that I think everyone went through) yet here we are, still together and thick as thieves.
So what’s going on? Nothing really, I’m actually just putting down some musings into the blog to keep things going.
Tim‘s birthday is on the 13th; however, we were all mostly free this Thursday evening to join him for a nice meal at Outback Steakhouse (North Strathfield) – we were there for company over the food, but it was hearty food, full of grease, and plenty of banter to be had!
Outback Steakhouse has been in my life for quite a while, actually. Despite it’s reputation, it served more as a common meeting point for various crowds of people that walked in and out of my life. When I got my first real job in the Tech Industry (working in marketing!) I planned many a LAN party event here with one of my best mates, Ben (missingo) at this restaurant over many many nights.
Anyway, retrospectives aside; the food hasn’t changed much at all (the prices have though, oof!)
They left too much of the fat cap at the end on, one end of the steak was charred way more than the other end (the fatty end was undercooked) – making the fat render and drench everything in grease, but not in a nice hot way. The steak was left to rest too long so it was almost cold; and the chips had coagulated with their cheese to form a solid brick (you can see in the photo, this is about 60 seconds after the plate was put down in front of me).
Still, I had a really enjoyable night (definitely more the company than the food, as it always has been) and everyone else that attended had a blast too!
It was good to see Marshy, Brad, Brad, Tanj, Amy, Sean, Jimmy, Bec, Mat, Gaetano, and the birthday boy, Tim. Happy Birthday mate.
I work on a lot of different coding projects from a personal perspective. Usually depending on mood, or other factors, I will jump from project to project, working on them whenever time permits. My most recent role in my career left me a little bit short of coding and development time; focusing instead more on project delivery, and team management to get a big product across the line at a FinTech startup.
So, to get my coding juices flowing once more, I thought I’d whip up some self-hosted work:
- Deploy and install GitLab to manage my code
- Build a site to track my activity to get back in the swing of things
Cue, https://jtiong.dev
What’s the purpose of this?
It is a simple quick overview of my activity on the code repositories that I’d ported over to my localized GitLab installation. It will let me see what I’ve been working on recently, and keep me motivated, on continuing to polish my skillsets.
What this project demonstrates
Well, this demonstrates several things I thought might be handy going forward:
- Deploying an NGINX Proxy (on an external machine), via Docker Compose to manage the incoming connections to jtiong.dev and other various websites
- Deploying GitLab Community Edition onto a different physical server for my personal use and code management
- Creating a Docker Compose deployment based off the
php7.4-apacheimage for the site - Using my own framework Spark – to create this site
- Using a self written URL Router
- Using PSR-4 to autoload classes
- Interacting with the GitLab REST API
- Using Bootstrap 4.x for a very simple frontend
Source code to the site can be provided as needed to, although I really need to clean it up.
It’s been good getting back in the saddle for some basic web development again! 🙂
So, I’ve got a “main” website – https://jtiong.com (which is currently Error 500’ing)
Which runs on a fairly old version of Laravel. Since it’s inception; the site was used mainly as a central one-stop shop for everything about my presence on the internet. Oh how times have changed.
Nowadays, it makes more sense with a number of domains I own, to split up the content and footprint of my stuff on the internet from a singular jtiong.com website, into a number of different sites based upon what people trying to find me for, or to categorise the activities I do.
Domains I have include:
- jtiong.com (this site) – my personal blog, which is strictly just personal, non-professional stuff
- jtiong.dev – where I hope to eventually host some sort of software development info about myself
- jtiong.network – currently a serverless site experiment, however I hope to change this
- jtiong.com – a central landing page from which people click through to the other domains
So what does this mean?
Two new projects! The .com and .dev domains which will be important as part of my “online resume” so, I really should get them done sooner rather than later…!
However, this also means I need to really look into how I implement these!
Laravel will be driving:
- jtiong.com – a landing page/gateway system
- jtiong.network – services and resources for friends & family
I’m looking at using the Socialite package for Laravel to integrate login via Discord, this’ll mean that certain links and features will only be visible based off friends & family that have certain roles in my Discord server; or at least, that’s been the original intent.
My Own Framework (which I call Spark) – will be driving:
- jtiong.dev – dev blogs, resources
This dev site will be more of a technical dump to keep me consistently working on my coding skills. The setup of this site is a traditional website that’ll ride on the tails of my intended GitLab installation. The fallback of course, is to just use the GitHub API, but I’ll only start looking at that later.
The site should just start listing out my commits and on what projects they’re made on to try and keep things accountable and interesting. It’s just a cool little showcase project.
More features might be added later relevant to doing development work in the future!
My sister and her partner have been on a weekend getaway and I’ve been at home working and looking after Panko.
During such a time I’ve been pretty busy and Panko has been stuck amusing himself and moping outside my home office.
The guilt has finally hit me and I’m going to clean up my office so that Panko can hang out with me and chill in my home office. This means I’ll need to clean up all the computer bits, cable manage everything and make sure the room is doggo safe for him to chill in with me. I won’t proof it tot the point that he has free entry but if I’m in the office (I usually am) he can come in and chill too so he doesn’t let his anxiety get the better of him.
The things I do for this dog.
I’m moving all the blog posts I can from my old custom written blog, to this site. So weird posts might start appearing going backwards in time haha 😛
It’ll be nice to have everything in the one site, though.
Update: After 5 hours, it’s finally all done D:
Mum passed away at 1:17am this morning.
I think, it’s quite safe to say that 2020, has been an insane year.
I didn’t do my usual post at the end of 2019; and I didn’t do much for the start of this year either with my blog. There’s a lot of reasons for it; but on both a personal level, and indeed a global level – I think 2020 is a year that my generation will remember for quite a while.
It’s a year in which, the global markets stopped, then through sheer force of will, continued on. The age of the internet and remote services & tools were forced into a level of maturity that up until now, were only something the novel few could dip their toes such waters. Indeed, my own blog post (this post you’re reading now) is all about figuring out being able to work from anywhere, at any time.
2020 brought with it, COVID-19; which brought with it – significant health risks, and significant situations to my life that honestly, I never thought I’d see.
2020 was actually going to be a rough year for me anyway, as I moved towards focusing on caring for my elderly mother. I’d moved back home, and have been deciding what to start discarding in an almost Marie Kondo-esque fugue state. My home has always been filled to the brim with old knick knacks and gadgets, not to the excess you see on Marie Kondo’s show, but still – quite impressively full of old tech, clothes, and furniture.
There’s a lot to keep track of, and I’m in the process of decluttering my life. To do this, I’ve turned to a really interesting application that my friend and colleague, Matt, has pointed me to — Notion (https://notion.so). It’s kind of an all-in-one workspace style data collection application, kind of like Evernote.
It works across iOS, PC, Linux – it’s a web based application that’s very responsive. It provides a great way to take notes and keep organised, especially in the current hellscape of things in life right now.