Dealing with this now at work. Got a dev whose time in the industry should make him a senior dev but he gives off massive junior vibes.

• The need to change everything he touches

• Wanting to write clever code over straightforward code

• Everything “needs” a refactor

• Just deprecates things when he doesn’t want to learn them and writes a new implementation without updating old code

• Thinks he knows best while not understanding huge swaths of the codebase

• Everything he can’t understand in <5 min is stupid and wrong

If he was less competent (when kept in a box and closely monitored) I’d be pushing even harder to get rid of him.

Steam deck verified sucks because it tells you if it will run well on the deck, but doesn’t tell you if it’ll play well on the deck. If a game doesn’t have controller support then I’m not interested.

I’m not understanding the CoPilot hate. It’s an amazing tool if you are competent. Even when it gets it wrong it still saves me 90%+ of the typing then I just correct what it did differently than how I want it.

Boilerplate becomes a breeze and I work way better when I have something to iterate on rather than coming up with it from scratch. It lets me play with and test ideas way faster and sometimes even does it differently than I’d do it which leads to learning new things and/or looking at the problem in a different way. I don’t blindly follow its output, sometimes I reject it wholesale, sometimes I edit it, sometimes it’s literally exactly what I would have typed myself.

Oh fuck! I hadn’t heard for DRG:Survivor. I LOVE DRG and now I can’t wait for this game.

Also steam just started a big sale of these types of games that you should check out if you haven’t already. Shmup Fest.

Coming from the computer with near 2000 hours of gameplay in Factorio I just couldn’t make the jump to the deck. I miss the precision of a mouse and the keyboard shortcuts (the deck buttons weren’t enough and I didn’t want to memorize a ton of shift/modifier-* type shortcuts)

If you like HoT some other games to try:

• Vampire Survivors - I actually like this more that HoT and I played HoT first

• Brotato - Simpler version of this type of game, fixed map size but fun variant

• 20 Minutes till Dawn - I just started this (got it in a Steam bundle with Brotato) and it’s ok, I don’t like the aiming very much but it’s a decent game.

I really wish there was a distinction between “runs well on deck” and “plays well on deck”. I know that you can connect a monitor/mouse/keyboard but I’m mainly looking for games that I can play directly on the deck so mouse-heavy games are a pass for me (occasional mouse or only in certain menus is fine but not in regular gameplay).

Thankfully protondb is an amazing resource and answers most my questions along with Steam’s “full controller support” badge. I just wish there was a simple badge that covered both. There are some “Great on Deck” games that I strongly disagree with, like Human Resource Machine. It’s a great game, I love it, but great on deck it is not. It runs fine but it needs a mouse, the trackpads are way too finicky and the text too small IMHO.

I just got my steam deck a month or so ago during the summer sale but I think it’d be an instant upgrade for me.

I love the thing and anything it improves on I’d want. Even better if they make the upgrade/migration seemless so I can just “clone” my existing deck to the new one.

I left out an important word “left”, as in I get 25-30min into a run and it crashes. I’ll try performance mode!

I sent in logs of my crash to the devs back when it happened.

An actual release and not a shovelware shitty MMO. Look at the release cadence:

• Arena 1994

• Daggerfall 1996 (2 years)

• Morrowind 2002 (6 years)

• Oblivion 2006 (4 years)

• Skyrim 2011 (5 years)

• ??? (12+ years)

Does anyone else have Halls of Tournament regularly crash on their steam deck normally when they’ve got about five minutes or less in a run? It’s like 30-50% of the time for me.

I love the game but the crashing (and loss of progress) sucks. I need to pick up Vampire Survivors since I know it’s similar and look fun.

I’ve got nothing against SSR, never have, but CSR or even better SSR+CSR side steps a metric shit ton of issues. I’ve written untold lines of code to render something out in PHP then needed to add jQuery logic to the frontend for UX/UI reasons and then I’ve had to duplicate UI generation in JS/jQuery to match what PHP spits back (think: add a new row to an interface after an Ajax call finishes). It’s hell, you have to keep the two in sync and it’s a bug minefield.

Compare that to CSR where all the DOM is generated though a single codepath. Now take CSR to the next level with SSR+CSR and you’ve got a winning combo. Fast initial render and SEO gains (if you even need that) and only 1 DOM generation pathway.

People want to sound all smug “Oh, back to SSR are we?”, “Uh yeah, we had to CSR first to get to SSR+CSR which is VASTLY superior to SSR alone”.

Tech is circular in that way. See also mainframes, to personal computers, to cloud or any other similar cycle.

I much prefer having an in-memory database than mock what a database does.

Which sounds great in theory but then you get to find where your prod DB and testing DB differ and you have to keep chasing that. Unless you are using something like SQLite which has both (disk and in-memory) as an option.

I worked at a place that used a different in-memory DB (H2, IIRC) in place of our MySQL DB for testing. It ended up being hell to maintain and had to have hacks for how H2 and MySQL differ (tests would work in H2 but fail if run against MySQL or vice versa).

Stardew Valley and Halls of Torment

I’m still in the honeymoon period (2-weeks since I got it), but I find myself gaming with it every single day pretty much (I’ve put over 40, maybe 50 hours into it already). It’s so much easier to use (and more comfortable) than my computer, whileI don’t have a full gaming computer I’m playing games on my deck I could have played on my computer.

There are definitely games that work better on the steam deck than others but I found a large library of games that I enjoy playing. Also, emulators are a ton of fun and a way to recapture the nostalgia of my youth.