RWDC Industries, which makes a sustainable material solution that can be used as a substitute for plastic, raised $133 million in Series B funding.

Today Kevin’s game, Starcom: Nexus, releases in Early Access on Steam. It’s a thing of beauty, and also a lot of fun. If you like games that take you into outer space where you get to explore mysterious worlds, build a powerful ship, and explode bad guys, you should buy it, and play it, and let your gamer friends know about it. Yes, I’m biased, but reviewers and streamers  - who are not his spouse  - also love it :o). (FYI those last two links go to youtube streaming vids.)

***

Conversation at the dinner table:

Kevin: How was your day?

Me: Okay, I guess. I still can’t figure out how to get this girl to accidentally set her house on fire, then cause an explosion and get stuck in a window grille.

Kevin: I believe in you.

Me: Thank you. How was your day?

Kevin: Okay. When my enemy ships get within a certain distance of each other, they spontaneously explode.

Me: Oh!

Kevin: It’s not supposed to happen. It’s a bug.

Me: Oh.

Kevin: I can’t figure it out.

Me: I believe in you!

***


There are a lot of similarities between the work Kevin and I do. We both create complicated worlds with characters and plots. We’re both entertainers.

Meet your commander.

We have some processes in common: for example, we both study the books/games we love, then try to learn from them. We both think about the things we don’t like in other books/games, then try to come up with alternatives we prefer. We both know how to wear the creator hat; then switch to the reader/gamer hat, reading/playing our own project with a critical eye; then go back to the creator hat to fix what isn’t working. We’re both extremely familiar with the phenomenon wherein you change one little thing, then a ripple effect passes through the entire work, complicating/breaking things in ways you didn’t anticipate.

Meet the Ulooquo, an underwater alien race.

We can also get similarly overwhelmed by our own projects. I’ve talked a lot on the blog about how a book has many parts, and writing a book involves many jobs. Well, a game has SO many parts. It has music and art, visual effects, numerous interfaces, plot and character, mysteries and rewards. It must be able to support and absorb the choices of individual gamers, over which the creator has no control. It has SO many (literally) moving parts!



We also both work by ourselves for years on self-directed projects… then put our creations out into the world, hoping they’ll find the people who will love them.

These similarities are deep. They help us to understand each other’s frustrations and joys, and support each other meaningfully. This is awesome. However, I want to talk a little bit about the differences, which are many.

For example, in my writing career, I have an agent. She connects me to an editor who helps me craft the right words. Then, my editor works with my publisher to create a beautiful physical book, publicize and market that book, and sell that book for me.

An indie game developer, on the other hand, does everything himself, in an extremely saturated market with a lot of roadblocks. He can hire other people to help. Kevin hired a composer and an artist, to help him with his music and his characters (like the Commander and the Ulooquo above). He hired a marketing consultant to do a few things too. But he worked closely with those people, because he knew exactly what he wanted. And everything else has been the work of his own hands. He’s done SO much marketing and publicity work on his own that’s made me appreciate my own marketing and publicity departments even more than I did before. Self-promotion in a saturated market is really, really hard. It’s also stressful for a guy who happens to be humble and was raised with the good-old New England ethos of not bragging about himself :o).

Here’s another big difference: Kevin can release his game while it’s still in production, then use the feedback from early players to shape it and make it better. He can write code into the game that allows him to see how long players play; where they decide to drop out of the game; which options are being chosen more often than others. (He receives this information anonymously, in case you’re starting to worry that he can actually tell what you’re doing inside his game!) As a writer, I definitely don’t know where someone decides to abandon my book. Nor do I want to know, because once people are reading my book, it’s final! If everyone is bailing at a certain point, there’s nothing I can do about it. The words in my book are not going to change. Kevin’s game is more of a living, growing creature, even after it releases, and based on player reactions.

Another big difference is that while I am a wordsmith, Kevin is a programmer. A lot of the time, when I step into his office, he’s working with programming language on his many screens, and I don’t understand the smallest bit of it. My readers read my actual words. His gamers play a game built on a framework of programming that looks and feels very different from the actual game. He also works with a lot of complicated software (like, for 3D modeling) and does a lot of math. He uses trigonometry to [I just asked him to explain it and he said something about spaceships shooting at each other, vectors, and cosines. ???]. I can come home and tell him practically everything I struggled with at work that day. A lot of what he does is too technical for me to understand—though he is really good at creating analogies and explaining things to me when I ask (and when I'm not rushing to finish a blog post!).

Another difference is that he is a visual artist. For example, he created Entarq's Citadel below, which is one of the worlds his gamers get to explore.


Here's another.


Another difference:  I can do my work anywhere. All I need is my notebook and a pen. Kevin needs his fancy computer and his big monitors. So he works from home. Home office and self-employed means he’s working most of the time. Most mornings, he’s working by the time I get out of bed. By the time I leave for my office, he’s put hours in. I come home and he’s making me dinner; after dinner, he works for a few more hours. I go away on trips without him; he works while I’m gone! I always thought I worked really hard. I have a new standard now.

And now his work has created this beautiful, fun game that’s getting really positive attention from gamers and streamers :o). Today, you can buy it in Early Access, and become one of the players who contributes to what it will ultimately become.

And that's my little explanation of what it's like to live with an indie game developer. Check out the links if you’re interested! The trailer is below.

#301 — April 24, 2020 Read on the Web Database Weekly 'Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases' — A Google engineer (whose name may be familiar to those Go developers amongst you) shares 17 insights about databases she’s picked up over the years. I strongly recommend this piece and I identify with lots of the points myself.. Jaana B. Dogan Lambda Store: A New 'Serverless Redis' Service — This seems a neat idea. Claiming to not be just another Redis cloud service, Lambda Store applies a serverless-style pricing model which opens up a variety of neat use cases for the popular data structure server (serverless caching, for starters). The underlying system appears to be a custom clone of Redis rather than the real deal, however. Sven Anderson ???? AWS, GCP, & Azure Punch Back at the 2020 Cloud Report — AWS, GCP, & Azure each responded to the Cockroach Labs 2020 Cloud Report with instructions on how to tune their respective clouds for optimal performance. Cockroach Labs sponsor How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux — Even more exciting times are coming for development on Linux thanks to these technologies. A good overview from an engineer at ScyllaDB. Glauber Costa kvrocks: An Open Source, RocksDB-based, Redis-compatible Database — You know Redis’s API is good when so many projects continue to implement it for themselves. kvrocks brings the Redis API (with pretty good support) together with the RocksDB persistent key-value store. Written in C++. Bit Leak Mireo SpaceTime: An Absurdly Fast Spatiotemporal Database? — The SpaceTime database provides unprecedented analytical tools speed, sometimes outperforming other state-of-the-art solutions by three orders of magnitude. Miljen Mikić Cloud GPUs Aimed at Data Scientists — Core Scientific, an AI and cloud infrastructure vendor, is teaming with GPU-accelerated analytics specialist SQream Technologies to deliver a “GPU Cloud for Data Scientists.” Datanami An Easy Postgres 12 and pgAdmin 4 Setup with Docker — Docker provides an easy and loosely coupled way to get things set up in a development environment. Jonathan S. Katz Why We Index Everything — Tired of constantly managing indexes to speed up queries? Learn about how Rockset automatically indexes every field in a row-based store, column-based store, and search index. Rockset sponsor Redis Labs Moving RedisJSON to a New Codebase Written in Rust — RedisJSON provides a JSON data type to Redis and it’s been ported from C to Rust for better safety and developer experience. Gavrie Philipson (Redis Labs) Replicate Multiple Postgres Servers to a Single MongoDB Server using Logical Decoding Output Plugin David Zhang xsv: A Fast CSV Command Line Toolkit Written in Rust — Another ‘Swiss Army knife’ for your slightly structured data. Andrew Gallant ???? Jobs DevOps Engineer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands. X-Team Data Engineer (Remote - USA Only) — Help us architect and design “big data” systems which require queries returning within sub-second response times. Social Chorus

#309 — April 24, 2020 Unsubscribe  :  Read on the Web Golang Weekly Go Developer Survey 2019 Results — The annual survey results are here but calculated differently than in previous years. See how the community feels, what tools we use, and what we’re really using Go for. The Go Blog Fiber: An Express.js Inspired Web Framework for Go — If you know Express (from the Node world) than Fiber will look very familiar. It supports middleware, WebSockets, and various template engines, all while boasting a low memory footprint. Built on top of FastHTTP. Fiber We Now Offer Remote Go, Docker or Kubernetes Training — We offer live-streaming remote training as well as video training for engineers and companies that want to learn Go, Docker and/or Kubernetes. Having trained over 5,000 engineers, we have carefully crafted these classes for students to get as much value as possible. Ardan Labs sponsor A Comparison of Three Programming Languages for Bioinformatics — This is quite an academic piece but basically Go, Java and C++ were put head to head in an intensive bioinformatics task. The good news? Go won on memory usage and beat the C++17 approach (which was admittedly less than ideal) in performance. The team in question chose Go going forward. BMC Bioinformatics Go for Cloud — A Few Reflections for FaaS with AWS Lambda — A response to a this article about Go’s pros and cons in the cloud. You should read both. Filip Lubniewski ???? Jobs Enjoy Building Scalable Infrastructure in Go? Stream Is Hiring — Like coding in Go? We do too. Stream is hiring in Amsterdam. Apply now. Stream Golang Developer at X-Team (Remote) — Join the most energizing community for developers. Work from anywhere with the world's leading brands. X-Team Find a Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in tech roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started. Vettery ???? Articles & Tutorials An Introduction to Debugging with Delve — If you’re in the “I don’t really use a debugger..” camp, Paschalis’s story and brief tutorial might help you dip a toe into the water. Paschalis Tsilias Object Ordering in Go — This is all about object comparison and the types of comparisons that are allowed in Go. Reading this post > Not reading this post. Eyal Posener How to Manage Database Timeouts and Cancellations in Go — How to cancel database queries from your app and what quirks and edge cases you need to be aware of. Alex Edwards The Go Security Checklist — From code to infrastructure, learn how to improve the security of your Go applications with the Go security checklist. Sqreen sponsor Data Logging with Go: How to Store Customer Details Securely — Specifically, this looks at using custom protobuf FieldOptions to mark fields as OK to log and reflection to check those options. Vadzim Zapolski-Dounar How to Install Go in FreeBSD in 5 Minutes — You can use a package manager, but this way has advantages and it’s easy. Jeremy Morgan ???? Code & Tools Fynedesk: A Fyne-Powered Full Desktop Environment for Linux/Unix — Previously we’ve linked to Fyne, a Go-based cross-platform GUI framework, but now it’s been used to create an entire Linux desktop environment! Fyne.io Lockgate: A Cross-Platform Locking Library — Has support for distributed locks using Kubernetes and OS file locks support. Flant Pomerium: An Identity-Aware Secure Access Proxy — An identity aware access-proxy modeled after Google’s BeyondCorp. Think VPN access benefits but without the VPN. Built in Go, naturally. Pomerium Beta Launch: Code Performance Profiling - Find & Fix Bottlenecks Blackfire sponsor Apex Log: A Structured Logging Package for Go — Inspired by Logrus. Apex mediary: Add Interceptors to the Go HTTP Client — This opens up a few options: tracing, request dumping, statistics collection, etc. Here Mobility SDK iso9660: A Go Library for Reading and Creating ISO9660 Images — The use cases for this will be a bit niche. The author created it to dynamically generate ISOs to be mounted in vSphere VMs. Kamil Domański pxy: A Go Livestream Proxy from WebSockets to External RTMP Endpoints Chua Bing Quan

The United Kingdom has legislated to stop property developers from using offshore structures in the Crown Dependencies to avoid UK tax on profits.

Video game developers expand on their controversial opinions.

Microsoft on Thursday released tools that can be used by any developer on any platform, the company said in a statement, and added that developers will now be able to use the tools of their choice to create Android, iOS and Windows apps.

Microsoft on Thursday released tools that can be used by any developer on any platform, the company said in a statement, and added that developers will now be able to use the tools of their choice to create Android, iOS and Windows apps.

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Experience: 5 to 10
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Summary: Hiring Java Fullstack Developer for our Chennai assignment.

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Summary: Looking for bright, young UI/UX developers to help us create cutting edge designs.

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Experience: 2 to 6
location: Chennai
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Summary: Job Purpose: Development of cutting-edge digital products in the automobile ecosystem. Job Duties & Responsibilities: Designing, developing, maintaining and implementing software databases and developing dynamic web applications using....

Company: FIS Global Business Solutions India Private Limited
Experience: 7 to 10
location: India, Chennai
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Company: FIS Global Business Solutions India Private Limited
Experience: 6 to 9
location: India
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Summary: Job Description : Position Type : Full time Type Of Hire : Experienced (relevant combo of work and education) Education Desired : Bachelor of Computer Science Travel Percentage : 0% * Are you curious,....

Company: FIS Global Business Solutions India Private Limited
Experience: 0 to 50
location: India, Pune
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Company: FIS Global Business Solutions India Private Limited
Experience: 4 to 6
location: India, Pune
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Company: FIS Global Business Solutions India Private Limited
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Company: Pear Visa Immigration Services Private Limited
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Company: Pear Visa Immigration Services Private Limited
Experience: 2 to 10
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Company: Resource Access Management Solutions Private Limited
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Company: Datamine Infotech
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Thanks to smartphones and their downsized keyboards, autocomplete has become a nearly ubiquitous feature of how we write these days. To save us precious seconds composing and (at least in my fat-thumbed case) correcting words, our keyboards now prompt us with suggestions of what we’re trying to write to get the job done a little […]

Twitter is making it possible for developers and researchers to study the public conversation around COVID-19 in real time with an update to its API platform. The company is introducing a new COVID-19 stream endpoint to those participating in Twitter Developer Labs — a program that offers access to new API endpoints and other features […]

Apple and Google have provided a number of updates about the technical details of their joint contact tracing system, which they’re now exclusively referring to as an “exposure notification” technology, since the companies say this is a better way to describe what they’re offering. The system is just one part of a contact tracing system, […]

Apple and Google have released the first version of their exposure notification API, which they previously called the contact tracing API. This is a developer-focused release, and is a seed of the API in development, with the primary intent of collecting feedback from developers who will be using the API to create new contact tracing […]

The Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) just went through a major leadership change, with executive director Abby Kearns stepping down after five years (and becoming a CTO at Puppet) and the CFF’s CTO Chip Childers stepping into the top leadership role in the organization. For the most part, though, these changes are only accelerating some of […]

Microsoft has now opened registration for the virtual edition of its online-only Build 2020 developer conference, which will take place from May 19 to 20. Typically, the event draws more than 6,000 developers, but because of the coronavirus pandemic, that’s obviously not an option. In contrast to Google, which completely scrapped its I/O developer conference […]

Apple and Google have provided a number of updates about the technical details of their joint contact tracing system, which they’re now exclusively referring to as an “exposure notification” technology, since the companies say this is a better way to describe what they’re offering. The system is just one part of a contact tracing system, […]

Edward Cairney, 77, left, and Avril Jones, 59, were convicted of murdering Margaret Fleming, who has not been seen since December 1999 in Inverkip, Inverclyde aged 19.

British property developer Tamer Moustafa, 40, has been charged with murdering his wife and stabbing his next-door neighbour to death on her doorstep in a leafy suburb.

NHS digital innovation arm NHSX has asked the London office of Swiss firm Zuhlke Engineering to develop and support the new coronavirus app which is on trial on the Isle of Wight.

Apple revealed in March that its Worldwide Developers Conference would be hosted online, but has announced the official date - June 22. The event will be free to the public this year.

They say that the Aarogya Setu app is designed to collect a user’s location at certain points in the process.

A police official said a post-mortem will be done after tests for coronavirus infection is done, which is the practice now.

The third and possibly the final installment of the Android 11 Developer Preview has been released for Google Pixel smartphones. The new developer preview comes with build number RPP3.200230.017 and brings several new features in addition to the April 2020 security

Tech events are some of the exciting gatherings offering the latest discoveries. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced most of the events to switch to online behind closed doors. Some tech events were even canceled. Apple's WWDC Developer Conference is one

[New York, NY] : Apress, [2019]

Updates to the Chrome Developer Tools: CSS property quick search, memory stats for heap snapshots, CodeMirror upgrade and more.

Today, MDN announced their first-ever needs assessment survey for web developers and designers. The survey takes about 20 minutes and asks a variety of questions aimed at understanding the joys, frustrations, needs and wants of everyday web-makers. Mozilla have committed to making the results of the survey public later this year, and the survey itself […]

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