In the start of my career I felt that there was a sentiment around web dev that it’s not “real” programming in a way. Not sure if that’s the case any more seeing as the majority of modern develoment is for web platforms.

I’ve never heard the idea that PHP is a language used by web designers who migrated to coding, but it kind of makes sense. How PHP works, where everything is just HTML until the <?php tag comes in, made it so attractive as a way to add some spice to static pages. I cut my teeth on PHP and moved on to other languages later, so it makes sense that it would function as a gateway drug of sorts, also resulting in it not getting the attention from seasoned experts that other languages benefit from.

Calling dislike of PHP misogynistic feels like a massive stretch… but maybe it’s not considering how the designer/programmer divide also has a massive gender disparity. PHP has its problems, tooling being just one side of it, and its nature as a designer-friendly language makes it easy for elitists to mask their bigotry behind “objective” arguments that PHP is bad.

Was this the one everyone thought was boring? Or was it The Acolyte? Or the most recent season of The Mandalorian?

I do like me some Star Wars, but it’s feeling like we’re being oversaturating us with shows.

Back when I was actively playing Overwatch (this is now years ago) people were basically using the voice and text chat to be toxic shitheads to each other. At one point I decided that I didn’t need strangers telling me to kill myself in my life, so I ditched the game and generally just play single player games now.

Not sure how others have experienced it, but the community feeling of the past that the author is alluding to is gone. If it ever was there to begin with.

I really love his videos! It usually starts with me thinking “I understand some of this, maybe I could do some graphics programming” and always devolves into “I am completely unable to do any graphics programming.”

If you want something with a small footprint I would personally go for Rust, but anything that compiles to a static binary is going to be better than something that needs a dedicated runtime.

Python is what I use for small one-time scripts and utility stuff that doesn’t need to run long, but it may be worse than Java…

It’s great that Godot was in a good place when Unity had its (inevitable?) implosion. Having used both engines I think they are comparable enough that Godot was a perfect fit for small indie and casual devs to move over to without having to learn a completely new workflow. If Godot hadn’t been around I don’t know where everyone would’ve migrated to.

Great article! Ubisoft seem to be really good at making worlds that are immense and magnificent and yet utterly boring to be in.

That’s a very astute observation and it made me wonder if piracy was partly to blame for the death of the B-tier game (at least on PC). In my younger pre-Steam days me and my friends would pirate 9/10 of the games we played (if not more). Games like CoD/Fifa/Sims would get enough sales from regular folks, but who the heck was going to take a chance on something like Will Rock or Scrapland? I would often check out games at my local store and then go home to torrent them, meaning they lost out on sales from the kinds of weirdos who the games were made for.

I watch a stupid amount of YouTube so I pay for YouTube Premium. I wish that meant I could have premium features like disabling shorts, disabling those annoying themed sections that keep popping up (right now it’s the olympic games), a search function that actually searches for what I want instead of shoving more suggested videos in my face, and changing every “not now” button into “don’t ever ask again”.

Despite the fact that I’m a voracious consumer of YoutTube videos and a long-time paying customer, I have to accept that I am not the target audience. They want passive users who endlessly watch whatever gets put in front of them so that they never leave the app. If there was a respectful alternative that worked well with iOS and AppleTV I’d gladly pay for that instead.

I’ve been a fan of Dragon Age since Origins and this game looks like another step towards the kind of simplified gameplay that every game has made. It’s disappointing that the series has gone from an RPG to a generic 3rd person action adventure game, but given the gradual evolution of the other games it’s not really surprising.

kind of game Bioware has forgotten how to make.

Such a nice way to sum it up. You would think that the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 would show publishers that there is a (large) market for actual RPGs, but that’s maybe too much to hope for.

I haven’t had a gaming-capable PC for about a decade and I’m very happy with my PS5 (and the PS4 before it). Sony bringing exclusives to PC don’t feel like the end times as it’s just a way for them to make more money.

I’m genuinely glad that PC players will get to experience some of the great games that have been on the PS5 in the last few years.

I remember feeling liberated when streaming became big. Dealing with potential fake files, low quality, or having something stuck on 95% with no seeders was something I wasn’t going to miss when I ditched piracy for Netflix… then the streaming wars began and here I come crawling back.

I also pay for Kagi and I’m super happy with that decision. I do wish they’d stop putting so much AI cruft into their search engine, but at least I can disable it.

Ironically if the developers band together and start another studio they would probably have Microsoft knocking on their door with an acquisition offer in a few years.