I’ve been working on a game system for a few years now. At last check, it manages thousands of NPCs with triggers, scripts, reactions, and even proximity detection. Each character can respond differently based on player actions, game state, and environmental conditions.

I’ve been working on a game system for a few years now. At last check, it has over 27,000 words of dialogue. That’s roughly a novella’s worth of content that I’ve written in my spare time between building game systems, fixing bugs, and trying to remember what sleep feels like. This is a community project—everyone’s a volunteer, including me.

In Part A of this series, we explored code-level optimizations using modern C++ features—from move semantics to compile-time computation. These techniques provide excellent performance improvements while making your code more expressive and maintainable.

The evolution from monolithic architectures to microservices was revolutionary—but the shift to distributed cloud-native architecture is proving to be even more transformative for tech startups, enthuasists, and solopreneurs. As TechRepublic reports, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2025, over 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first approach, with 95% of new digital workloads being deployed on cloud-native platforms.

In part one of this series, we established stability as the foundation of any modernization effort. If your system isn’t stable, performance optimizations are essentially meaningless—-after all, a fast crash is still a crash.

We’ve all been there—inheriting a decade-old codebase, with tens of thousands of lines written by developers who have long since moved on. The code works (mostly), but making changes feels like defusing a bomb while blindfolded.

I’ve been working on a new release for a game server I operate on the side and, with any new release, comes opportunities to weep at refactor your older code.

I’ve been working on a project the past few months in asp.net core 2.2 and am in the process of converting various aspects of it over to Blazor (more on that soon). The first step is getting everything converted, in place, to asp.net core 3.0.

In C#, I’ve gotten spoiled over the years with LINQ and being able to create composite keys out of tuples to in-memory, static lookup tables or objects.

A fun side project I’ve been helping out on has me digging into quite a bit of Lua recently. It’s been been interesting to dig into, not withstanding the general headscratching (😠 arrays that start at 1…twitch). Since so many new games are developing their plugins and UI components in Lua, it’s a nice language to have in the toolkit.