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- engineering learning 2026-10-09Comments without accountsComment here with just a name, and your email stays private.
- design takeaway 2026-10-09User feedback expresses symptoms, never the problem or the solutionPlayers tell you where it hurts, not what to fix. The grind should still be fun.
- design learning 2026-10-09A guided tutorial beats a room with 100 optionsWhy Arcana's tutorial became a guided map instead of an open list of quests.
- design takeaway 2026-10-09User overload is real. Less early is more early, and more later is more laterToo many features too early can ruin a good game. Unlock them over time instead.
- engineering learning 2026-10-09A list of 52,000 enemies froze the serverMy biggest single-call speedup. A List to a HashSet took /killall from 26 seconds frozen to about 1.
- engineering adopted 2026-10-09Only check the parts of the map where players areCosmic Realm checked all 16,384 map chunks every tick to find the players. Now it keeps count.
- design adopted 2026-10-09The importance of CI-UT (continuous integration user testing) in game and system designWhy I build games in a loop with playtest groups of 50+ players.
- engineering learning 2026-10-09Frustrations with PvP combat networking in TPS game serversProjectiles, movement and lag in a game that only updates 10 times a second.
- design takeaway 2026-10-09Build UI from a few components, not one-off screensHow I learned UI over eight years, from hand-placed screens to a component system with declared states.
- engineering learning 2026-10-06From Podman Compose to systemd services to Kubernetes clustersHow Seneca Foundation's infrastructure got rebuilt five times.
- engineering postmortem 2026-09-23Removing a privileged init container broke Zammad's temp directoryA support desk 500 caused by hardening one thing too far.
- engineering postmortem 2026-09-21Gmail compliance when deploying a fresh company mail serverFive bounces from my own mail server, and what each one taught me.
- engineering consideration 2026-08-30AWS vs OVH costsWhat a k3s cluster costs on AWS and OVH, over 1 year and over 10.