I first learned about Flexbox Froggy quite a while ago – it’s a wonderful resource for both learning what flex can do and as a resource for remembering a specific flex property. Sure, a site like CSS-Tricks has a great flexbox article which I refer to just about every time I work with flex, but sometimes you just need to put some frogs on lilypads. I saw it in my bookmarks earlier today and ran through some of the exercises again. #24 is still pretty intense for how it works – and works without class-specific order rules, which is incredibly impressive in my book. Continue reading Flexbox Froggy →

Two weeks ago, several of my friends and I – who play a cooperative videogame together – were a little frustrated with some changes made with no warning by the developers. We didn’t understand why they made them (they never communicated a clear goal or process or … anything, really) and we certainly didn’t like many of them invalidating previously useful pieces of equipment and strategies and so on, without giving us new, similarly effective stuff. It was, more or less, a global nerf. To a free product, that’s one thing, but to a product people paid money for? And to a product with many, many DLC items people paid more money for? A no-warning, no-explanation global balance change was awful.

On the other hand, the developers helpfully left the entire code to change everything in unencrypted lua, and the clients trust the local lua … so if we modified the values and all ran with the same code, we’d all experience the same balance. Security? What’s that? But convenient for our purposes.

After reading a lot of community complaints about the changes, I thought “…I can do this. I can make this.” So I took it upon myself to redo the balance values, distribute a lua override file to my friends, and for us, at least, we’re playing the game we want to play. It wasn’t until I was having what amounted to an impromptu standup over VOIP that I realized …we’re basically doing agile videogame modding. Continue reading Agile in the unlikeliest of places →

In late 2014, I went into a … well, not crunch, but let’s say an extended period of head-down development and content migration for a much-needed new website redesign at my employer. My organization started the website redesign project in July 2013 and we  launched a new one on January 23, 2015. Switching the A-record that afternoon was one exciting moment … mostly because we weren’t sure the website was going to work.

That’s always comforting, right? Continue reading Website Redesign Lessons Learned →