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.

Code formatting is a bit of a religious discussion among developers. Spaces or tabs, whitespace positions, and line endings at certain elements are all part of the style guide to a project.

Now that the initial configuration is taken care of (see part 1), the real interesting stuff awaits in part 2.

As I mentioned before, SQL Operations Studio is my new favorite SQL digging tool for queries. It loads fast, is portable, and, most of all, has user-configurable widgets.

As part of my migration from my old blogging software to new, I needed a way to snag all of the images. However, the old system stored the images as extension-less numbers, making it tedious to match article slug to image quickly. I pulled down a database extract with photo ID and slug, but needed a way to pull down the images and rename them from /{id} to /{slug}.{proper_extension} accordingly.

Hugo is a website framework that I decided to use this past week for a short project and, afterwards, liked it so much I’ve decided to rework this blog with it. Here’s a few of the quick lessons I had as a first-time user.