Well, it has only been... 2 months since I last did this exercise. But I've been thinking about this for a while, even as I was redoing my previous design. This time around, I decided to just go ahead and do it and see where the cards fell, and I was very pleased with the result I came up with.
I have spent a lot of time in the time in the Minecraft server scene. I've been highly visible, in both my good and bad moments. But perhaps my most substantial and consequential project in that scene, specifically the Velocity Minecraft server proxy, is the most interesting story to tell.
Who built the Burj Khalifa, standing high above gleaming Dubai? Did the Emirati royals smelt the steel? Would they ever be forced to toil in the desert heat?
Well, it sure has been a while since I last updated this website back in the far away time of... October 2022. Naturally this means I now need to go in and actually give it a refresh, especially as I am trying to make this website a little bit more than a blog that gets an article roughly semi-annually, and start exploring doing more creative writing along with deeper technical reads.
I would've written about 2023 some time ago, but quite a few developments happened in my life... and so, I held off for a bit. But now I am back to tell the story of 2023. It was probably one of the most stressful years in my life.
A sojourn looms, heavy and stark. Homeward bound, today I shall embark. Life does not pause for the mourner under this dome. But all I seek is home.
Back in 2020, before the pandemic really hit, I started working on two projects built on top of Cloudflare Workers. One of those projects was the Mineteria Store, which jammed together server-side React running on top of an environment that server-side React didn't exactly run on at the time mixed with traditional client-side rendering, and a service to render Minecraft avatars called Crafthead, now maintained by Nodecraft. (Funny enough, the Mineteria Store is, to my knowledge, the only deployment of Elixir that was remotely close to the Minecraft server scene. What a time that was.)
Times Square in 1978 was the dictionary definition of urban decay. Neon lights that once belonged to posh theaters now advertised peep shows and adult entertainment. Street corners were populated by sleazy motels, adult stores, and dodgy nightclubs and bars. The area was populated only with the lowest of American strata, those who had no other place to go. Below the cacophony of cars on the streets seeking to get the hell out as quickly as possible, the subway whirred, with its signs of neglect perhaps worse than what was present above ground. Outside of Times Square, the city burned. Riots, burglaries, and arson had consumed large blocks of Brooklyn and the Bronx. Nobody wanted to be next.