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The Only Truth Will Be Cryptographic
Photographs are easy to fake. So much so that there is a turn of phrase to describe it. People say something is "'shopped" when they are skeptical regarding the veracity of an image. This refers to...
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Linux Conf AU 2020 Talks
Last week I was on the Gold Coast for Linux Conf AU. I gave two talks: Piku: git push deployments to your own servers px3d: a free software browser based pixel 3D nano-engine in ClojureScript Other...
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Sub-Dunbar Software
I've been thinking about this idea lately of software written for small groups of mutually-trusting humans, like families. I like to think of this type of software as "sub-Dunbar software", named...
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The Forest Moons of Yendor
Last week I entered the 7 Day Roguelike Challenge. I used the the px3d game engine with Blender and ClojureScript to build a game prototype. The Forest Moons of Yendor by chr15m
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Slingcode: Personal Computing Platform
Recently I was teaching one of my kids a bit of web coding. This is way more complicated than it should be. There are so many moving parts - configuration, build systems, editors, hosting...
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The Zero Customer Heuristic
When you're building some MVP or SLC it's tempting to over-think technical choices early on. It's tempting to build in all kinds of features and infrastructure. "People might want a PDF," you think to...
View ArticleUn-template Python HTML Library
Un-template is a minimal Python library to modify and render HTML. The idea is to start with a pure HTML document, choose the bits you want to modify using CSS style selectors, and then change them...
View ArticleSlingcode Is Out
At the end of June I finally shipped Slingcode, the browser based code editor I've been working on for several months. The response was overwhelming: ~22,000 visitors to the site. ~7,000 uses of the...
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Roguelike Browser Boilerplate
Recently I launched this web based template project that you can use to make your own roguelike game. If you've ever wanted to make your own roguelike game and you know a bit of web development then...
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It's Asterogue Launch Day
Since I was a kid I've always loved the roguelike genre. These procedurally generated mostly-text-based games have a wonderful depth and I've long been fascinated by the leverage and replayability you...
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Bootstrapping and Convexity
Nassim Taleb has this idea of "convexity". There's a bunch of complicated maths but it's actually quite a simple concept once you get it. This concept is useful for indie hackers and people...
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Random Hip Hop Beat Generator App Re-launch
In October 2010 when the Android store was just a spring chicken, I built a minimal open source app that generates random hip hop beats called "Can of Beats". I had been getting into procedurally...
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A procedural MIDI melody generator
I've just released a melody generator that I've been working on for a while. It's a small web app that you can use to procedurally generate looping MIDI melodies and then use them in your own music....
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A Hand-doodled Roguelike Tileset
I've been working on a free hand-doodled roguelike graphics tileset called Doodle Rogue. It's an alternative to the standard console and pixel roguelike graphics tilesets out there. I'm relatively new...
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What I learned bootstrapping side projects in 2020
In 2020 I made $693 USD from side projects. I contributed to several open source projects and made about a thousand commits on GitHub. I shipped a commercial game, a SaaS product, an IDE, two music...
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One million people saw my dumbest tweet
The word "meme" was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. A meme is an idea that replicates itself from mind-to-mind, just as a gene replicates itself through organisms. The word...
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How I beat Google at their own game
Recently I hit a milestone. My procedural melody generator became the number one result for the Google search "melody generator". Even better, I beat out Google's own product "Chrome Music Lab". Ever...
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What I'm working on right now
We're just over half way through 2021 so I thought I'd post an update about the projects I'm working on right now. tl;dr: music apps, a new game, and a micro-SaaS app. A few months back I was feeling...
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Bootstrapped Apps Update
Bootstrapping a one-person software business is a long and winding road. I have the luxury of time and resources on this quest but I know others aren't so lucky. I'm interested in uncovering the...
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How I invalidated my best startup idea
It's a simple fact that most startup ideas are not going to work out. Just like most tweets never get a retweet, most GitHub projects have no users, and most Hacker News posts never get an upvote....
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Melody Generator iOS
After many days of debugging (and filling out a bajillion forms) Melody Generator is finally available as an iOS app! It's also available on the Google Play store. You can still use the web app...
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Build Full-stack ClojureScript Websites With Sitefox
Sitefox is a back-end web framework for ClojureScript. I built it because I wanted to use ClojureScript to build websites and apps instead of Python and Django. It's inspired by frameworks like...
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Doodle Rogue Tileset
Hello reader! I'm excited to announce the release of the Doodle Rogue tileset. It's a free hand drawn tileset containing tiles and sprites that I used in my game Smallest Quest. I thought it would be...
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Doodle CSS HTML theme
The other day I released Doodle CSS. It's a simple hand drawn HTML/CSS theme. You can use it make a web page look like a hand drawn mockup. Since then it has garnered an astonishing ~500 GitHub stars,...
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A Space Ship For Lizards
My son asked me to make a spaceship for his lizard toys. This is it. Lizard persons not depicted.
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Come Warm Yourself By The Flaming Wreckage Of My Micro-SaaS
Gather round friends for a true and epic tale of glorious Indie Hacking. How I built and launched a micro-SaaS product in 26 weeks. How I discovered the quiet joy of incremental progress. How I...
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YouTube Cancelled My Nextcloud How-to Video
Dear YouTube, What the actual heck? Here I was, innocently demonstrating how to install Nextcloud on a Linux VPS server. I just want to help other people liberate their data. Nextcloud is super cool...
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Jsfxr Pro Retro Sound Effects Generator
It's been a while since I posted an update. So this is it! The tl;dr is I'm working on a sound effects generator micro-SaaS and I am nearly ready for launch. In February this year I was working on the...
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Post An Image To Mastodon Using Nbb
Mastodon is a real breeze to develop for. I was able to use nbb (Clojure scripting on Node.js) to post an image using the API in a few minutes. Here's how. Step 1: Create a new Mastodon app. Go to...
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Micro-Startup Plans for 2023
2022 was a fun year for side projects. My indie apps made $2500 USD. I also hacked on a lot of open source code, doodled a fair few drawings, and started a new sci-fi lo-fi beats music project. \o/...
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PO Sync Pocket Operator Sync App
My first app of the year is out, hooray! \o/ It's a simple app to sync pocket operator devices. It outputs a sync signal from your phone which you can plug into your pocket operator's left input to...
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Python Will Be Number One
I predict Python will be the most used programming language among developers world wide by 2032. This post contains my reasoning. First take a look at this chart. (Chart source. In the chart...
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Roguelike Browser Boilerplate is now open source
Hello! Just in time for 7DRL, Roguelike Browser Boilerplate is now open source. The boilerplate is a JavaScript based game template that takes care of all the annoying stuff like splash screen, start...
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ClojureScript UIs in 500 Bytes
tl;dr: you can generate very small (less than 1k) JS artifacts from ClojureScript with some tradeoffs. I worked out a list of rules to follow and made the cljs-ultralight library to help with this....
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Announcing livereload.net
Hello! Today I am very excited to announce a thing I've been tinkering with for the past month or so. You can find it at https://livereload.net. It's a simple online utility that enables live...
View ArticleReplacing React With Preact in ClojureScript
Today I put together a small test repo to check how much space is saved when replacing React with Preact in a ClojureScript project. I used npm init shadowfront prtest to get a basic project up and...
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CSS Animations for Game Juice
tl;dr: have some CSS animations to make your browser games juicy! My favourite game engine is the browser. You get so many batteries included when you use the browser as your runtime. Sprites,...
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Moving Back to London & 2023 Review
On the last day of 2023 we hopped on a plane to London. We've been here two and a half months now. Michelle and I lived here in 2009 and we've come back again with kids. I guess you could call this a...
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Generating VST Plugins With ChatGPT
tl;dr: check out LuaVST on ChatGPT if you want to generate some VST plugins. I've been doing weekly beats this year and it has been a lot of eustress fun (my best song so far is "smectite canyon...
View ArticleInstalling Xubuntu 22.04 on a Dell XPS 13
Last week I installed Xubuntu 22.04 on a Dell XPS 13 (9305). It was flawless. Everything just works out of the box. 𤯠This is completely amazing for me because I have been installing GNU/Linux on...
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Generating ClojureScript Reagent Apps With Claude AI & Scittle
Claude AI has a mode where it can generate something called "artifacts". One of the things you can do with this is generate simple single page web applications. It generates the web app and then...
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I Made Makesprite for Generating Sprites
makesprite.com is a simple open-source online app I made for generating sprites for games. The first time you open the app it downloads a set of default prompts and sprite sheets. These are a useful...
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You Can Play Asterogue In Your Browser Now
tl;dr: you can play the new version in your browser here ðï¸ https://asterogue.com This is just a quick note to let you know I re-released my sci-fi roguelike Asterogue for the web, so you can now...
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What Was Good About PHP
Developers optimize for different things in different situations. Developers at big companies with big teams optimize for process and unit tests and scaling. I optimize for building web apps fast and...
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ClojureScript Tiny Slides
ClojureScript Tiny Slides is grug-brained presentation software. Write your slides in Reagent Hiccup. Static web app you can upload to any web host. Tiny hackable codebase. No setup or config, just...
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Everything is Special
We have a tendency to view things as fungible. That's a fancy way of saying "substitute one thing for another." It's how we make sense of the world. We say "that thing is like that other thing, let's...
View ArticleAdvantages of Generating Clojure with LLMs
So far Clojure is not the best choice of language when it comes to generating code using LLMs. This is probably because it is a niche language and so it is less well represented in the training set....
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