Time to review, reflect and move forward

This year has been a long year of repeated trial, error and discovery. Lets just recap a few of my big highlights

• I failed or more so lost steam when it came to building a big rpg as a first game
• I was able to build beautiful full CI/CD pipelines for all my projects. My game is still a WIP, that being said I have unit tests, functional tests, build pipelines for server/client configs, code coverage for non unreal engine builds and I have all of these for my apps, cli’s and all tools I made where its applicable
• Not being able to complete that game leveled up my project management skills as well. I’ll be expanding upon my new setup in a different post. Now I have Linear, Reclaim and Google Calendar to manage and automatically schedule my work based on priority and my overall capacity
• My first big mobile project is near completion. Soon you’ll see me post more about my new app Housemates! I plan on breaking down my app and explaining how/why I did things the way I did within reason
• I made my first homebridge plugin! If you’re into aquarium controllers, I made a plugin to be able to turn my reef tanks outlets on/off with Siri
• Dabbled with Kubernetes. I went from Kubernetes to Docker Swarm and then back to Kubernetes. I currently host ArgoCD(deploys applications to the cluster), BuildKite(CICD), Media Servers and a few other services
• Developed better habits around testing and package management. I try to use Googles guidelines for building tests (test for real functionality and not to just hit some code cov number). On top of that I have been using renovate on all of my repos to keep my packages up to date and pinned with specific versions

As you can see I’ve been busy! I plan on writing about everything I mentioned. Plan to start seeing regular posts from me again in the New Year.

Going into 2024 this is what I want to accomplish

• Clean up my kubernetes cluster a bit. I was able to automate about 70% of the cluster. I want to bump that number up to 100% as well as start to use an external secrets provider. The goal being that I can run a script and have my entire cluster working again in minutes
• Release the entire Housemates suite. My Housemates app is actually a collection of apps. Housemates is the first app which I plan to release in Feb. I want to release the rest of the suite by the end of the year with a stretch goal of creating a web version.
• Make a simple roguelike game just to be able to finally say I made a game (I still plan on having it be a quality game. It will just be small and not as complex as a game like Returnal for example)
• Continue working with Diversion. I’ve had countless people reach out to me in regard to setting up Unreal Engine with Perforce and a CI. Diversion is a new SCM that’s cloud native that has git like familiarity and Perforce performance. Full disclosure, I’ve been writing for them lately and using the tool. Its amazing and I plan on using it for the roguelike game I mentioned earlier
• Ironically this is prob one of the easier items on this list but the one I’m dreading the most… updating this site! I originally used this template and I have been updating packages but hit a point where I need to upgrade node which will break some major functionality. I’ve been looking for other templates and have yet to find another one that spoke to me like this template did. I plan on attempting to recreate it with Gatsby or Astro