Starting a Blog, For Real This Time

I set this blog up at the end of August. I picked the domain and fought with the design (the card widths were grating, the spacing on the category chips was off) until it looked like a candlelit spellbook. Then I didn’t write a single post for a month. The front page held three placeholder articles full of lorem ipsum. If you stopped by in September, that’s what you got. Not my finest work.

I haven’t really done a blog in at least fifteen years, so I’m a little rusty at this part.

By day I lead a marketing data and analytics organization, and I teach college courses as an adjunct. In my free time I build RPGM Tools, a company I’m trying to grow out of what started as a personal project. Mostly that means coding cool projects and playing with AI, and learning a lot about it along the way.

The biggest thing it has shipped so far is Neo Angband. It’s a port of Angband, a roguelike I first played back in the ’90s (Moria before that, in the ’80s). The goal is to stay as close to the original game as possible while making it moddable and playable in a browser. Being able to reach into the game’s objects and extend them with mods is the kind of modernization I think it has needed for a long time.

Neo Angband will show up here, but it’s one project in a good mix. I’ll write about all of them: how they’re going, the ideas I’m chewing on, and what I learn along the way. Expect a lot of software engineering and UI/UX, plus a steady stream of notes on working with AI tools day to day.

A couple of examples. I once had an assistant estimate a change at two to four days. I told it that was nonsense, since nothing takes it days, and to just do it. It finished in a few minutes. It’s a small thing, but it shows how these tools still borrow human timelines they don’t live on. I’ve also learned to question anything an assistant calls a settled decision. A lot of the time it turns out to be a gap it misread as one.

A lot of this is new to me, and I’ll say so when it is.

Anyway, the lorem ipsum is gone. That counts as progress.