Author: Richard

Apologies

Well I guess I should apologize for the radio silence. This lapse was a doozy. Sorry for that. I clearly need to build in a day of the week where I sit down and write rather than code. It’s the only way I can have any hope of maintaining this site. And beyond writing for it, anyone who’s looked at it can see there’s plenty of design work to do as well.

Site Update

On to the real point of this post though: FindFamiliar is almost done. Well, at least the MVP (minimal viable product) is. It’s hard to put into words how excited I am about this. It’s a big deal to me. I’ve been working on this thing for a long time. I’ve had to build a whole new skill set in order to be able to do it, and it’s taken me a long time. It’s also been uncertain whether I’d even be able to finish in time. I’ve been in a race against the clock against my finances, and hoping I could pull this gamble off. Granted, I’m a long ways from out of the woods, but that’s probably a different post. I’m shooting for a victorious tone here rather than impending doom.

At this point, I would say that FindFamiliar is almost feature complete. We have a lot of work left to do, mostly in test and debug, and some major chunks to sort out, like being able to take money, but I don’t anticipate too many more full days of coding. Right now, the site is in a place where you can navigate to it, create an account and log in, try to build a character, and usually get back a valid result. You’ll also usually have a character that makes sense. In essence, our product is a broken, borderline trash. I’ve been dreaming of this day for months.

Yes, it isn’t ready yet. No it doesn’t produce perfect results yet. But, it’s a product. Most people would be dissatisfied with it, but it works. It does something. Rather than talking in the abstract, I have something I can show people. I can push a button and have the site do something. Other than throw an error that is. This is a big deal. We have a lot of fine-tuning to do in the days ahead, but…we have a product.

For those wondering what’s left: I need to account for race adjustments and powers, flesh out building an animal companion for those who get one, build in spell memorization and generate an inventory for a character. That’s it for the actual game systems that need to be represented. Beyond that, we need to be able to take payment, generate gift codes and I need to flesh out the API some more for the front end. Lastly, we need to pick a hosting provider. From that point on, it’s just bug fixing until I think it works well enough to go live. Most of it is pretty close though. Maybe you disagree, but I think that’s a pretty short list, and I’m practically bouncing in my chair.

Why am I so excited about this? There’s the obvious things, like hoping it is enough of a success that I can keep going as a self-sufficient entity, but that’s just the base level. I’m also excited because I think I’ve built something that is really best in class. I’ve only found one competitor site to FindFamiliar, and it’s flawed in comparison, at least in my opinion. The intersection between software developers and tabletop RPGs is pretty major, and yet nobody else has really put anything like this together. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to pretend I can interpret that as a market signal, and my impending success. It could easily be that nobody has an interest in this product. It’s way too soon to tell how the financial side is going to shake out.

I see it like this: There are all kinds of dynamic character sheets. HeroLab is a product based around allowing people to easily create player characters (and is really good at that), but nobody is doing NPC generation, and specifically trying to take all of the work out of that. That’s why I’m excited. I’ve found a small corner of the world, and created what I think is a best in class software solution for a niche problem. I’m proud of that. Even if it fails financially, I’m still proud of the work I’ve done.

Finally, it’s a first big and important step: I’ll have created a product of my own. I have a company now, and soon we’ll have a product. Just being able to say that is a big deal to me. Maybe I’ll do a post just on my business at some point here. Both the nitty-gritty of setting it up as well as the ideas I have going forward. The IRS tells me it’s a disregarded entity, but that’s just, like, their opinion.

The Long Tail

I’m hoping FindFamiliar won’t fail financially, obviously. And I think we’ve got a decent chance of success on this front. Success for me in this case is a pretty low number. It’s basically enough for me to meet expenses between now and whenever my next project comes out. My whole plan here is just to keep myself above water until something hits. And if nothing hits, then, I don’t know. Maybe I get a job somewhere.

The Internet is a powerful thing though. It gives you access to hundreds of millions of people. If you pick a particular demographic group you want to create a product for, there’s a good chance that most of them have Internet access. There are obvious caveats to this, but I’m not going to waste time pointing out all the groups you could sell to who aren’t on the Internet. The point is that it’s possible to find these people. Furthermore, when you’re just two guys, it doesn’t take a lot of people to make a product a success. We’re not a big organization, and so we have lower needs than big organizations. It also means that we can play in spaces that big organizations wouldn’t normally waste their time with.

As was observed in the book The Long Tail, the number of people interested in a particular thing asymptotically approaches zero. Whatever it is you produce, some people will find it and want it. If you doubt this, just take a look at some of the lowest selling games on Steam Spy. These games often look like hot garbage, and are still moving a few thousand units. If those games are being produced in a low cost of living area or country, and are cranked out by a team of a few people, moving a few thousand copies at $5 each is a pretty good living. And the numbers shoot up quite a bit once you get past a quality threshold that is pretty easy to clear. Jeff Vogel has made a pretty good living producing games for a niche market of gamer that nobody else wanted to waste their time with for years; though there has been a resurgence there recently.

My plan, such as it is, is to keep tracking down these niche markets. I want to play out on the right hand side of the long tail, producing things for people that are underserved, and hope that I can make enough products of interest for people that I can make a decent living. I’m not shooting to get rich. I want to live comfortably, and forge my own destiny.

That is why I’m excited.

Wow, a month has slipped by since the last time I published something to the site. That isn’t what I had in mind for an update schedule. I was hoping to do something every two weeks at a minimum. I will try to better honor that going forward. I want to keep this site from going stale, and taking an hour or two every few weeks to write something should be perfectly doable. Anyway, on to the meat of the entry!

Update on the NPC Generator

As I’ve talked about previously, what makes this project such a pain to produce (and why there isn’t one quite like this to my knowledge), is that the rules are full of exceptions and modifications. It’s built on it. It’s also built on making a lot of decisions that offer situational advantages. Things like getting bonuses for using a certain weapon, fighting a certain monster, or favoring a certain school of magic.

These little situational advantages aren’t a problem when they’re spelled out and are the same for every character of that class or race or what have you. A good example is characters that are smaller races (dwarves, gnomes, halflings) get a bonus to armor class against large opponents. This is easy; if the character is a gnome, add the power to the character sheet and leave it to the GM to remember to account for it (a large part of games like Pathfinder is remembering all the situational stuff when the time comes; a skill I’m terrible at). The trouble comes when these situational advantages are combined with character specific choices. Now I need to combine a power with logic that accounts for the character’s other powers and abilities to make a coherent choice.

A good example to demonstrate this is Fighters’ Weapon Training and Weapon Mastery. It may surprise you to hear that Fighters are good at fighting. They get a lot of bonus feats based around being good at fighting as well as some powers that boost their offensive and defensive capabilities. The first of these powers is Weapon Training, which basically gives the fighter combat bonuses when using a weapon category of their choosing (say Heavy Blades or Polearms). The trouble comes from the fact that a very common feat choice is Weapon Focus, and then Weapon Specialization. If a Fighter has taken the Weapon Focus feat, then when they get Weapon Training, they should pick the weapon group that their focused weapon comes from. And of course they can take Weapon Focus for multiple weapons, and get to pick multiple groups for Weapon Training as they gain levels. Then, the whole thing caps off at level 20 with Weapon Mastery which gives them advantages when using a single weapon (a rapier, say), and of course this decision should be based on picking the weapon that the fighter is already the most effective with based on the feats and Weapon Mastery decisions that have been made to this point.

This alone is kind of a mess, and there’s something like this for each of the classes, more or less. And very little of it is the same kind of mess. The big challenge then was how to write a program to go through and make all of these decisions without just writing a separate logic tree for each of the character classes that would handle all of the decisions but also repeat a lot of the things that are similar.

At first I was going to use an abstract base class, and have a module for each of the character classes derive from that. Then the things that tended to be the same for each class could be grouped into the base class, and the children could define the logic specific to being a Barbarian or a Rogue or whatever. The trouble with that, to me, was two-fold.

First, there are a lot of classes in this game. Paizo has published a lot of content for Pathfinder, and many of the books add new classes, each one requiring it’s own module. Every time a new book comes out with new classes I’ll have to write a new module that is largely the same as the others, and so I’d be updating the code all of the time. I really didn’t want to do this. Rather, what I want is to be able to create a logic engine that can create an NPC of any character class, existing or yet to be defined, without requiring me to go and change the code.

The second problem was just that the whole thing felt like a mess. A lot of logic seemed to be relatively generic to each class, but had to be tied into the parts that weren’t generic. It also meant I was defining a lot of things in code that should have been in the database. This last part wasn’t necessarily emergent from the design so much as just something stupid I was doing at the same time. However, once I realized I should move all that stuff into the database and out of the code, it made it pretty obvious to me that once that’s done I should be able to create a logic engine that is agnostic to the character class being created.

A Bespoke Language

So the solution finally came to me, courtesy of past experience and having read The Pragmatic Programmer: Write a Domain Specific Language. This would allow me to embed commands into the database model that could inform the logic engine of decisions it would need to make based on recently acquired powers, what would need to be added, what would need to be excluded, and so forth.

When I was first introduced to this idea, I was finishing up my degree and taking a programming languages course. It seemed kind of crazy to me to write a whole new programming language to solve one specific task. But that was mostly because I was taking an academic course that was focusing on defining general purpose tools and aspiring to creating the platonic ideal of a programming language (which was apparently Ada). But that’s not what a DSL is. At least not when I make one.

No my friend, my DSL was quick and dirty. It’s case sensitive, has almost no expressiveness, and a syntax bad enough to make even the most tolerant programmer want to barf. It’s not quite Ook, but it’s closer to that than, say, C#. But it has one thing going for it: It works. It’s allowing me to write one module that contains all of the logic to create a randomly generated NPC. There’s no fluff, or crust. I have a specification for it that outlines the commands and their syntax, and any time I run into something I hadn’t yet accounted for I can just update my spec, write the logic for my parser and move on. The nice thing is, once I can embed commands like this, the logic does become pretty generic, and so there are only a handful of specific carve-outs in the code. I’ve posted the specification (as of this writing) in the project section of the site here.

The Other Big Pieces

So, all in all things are looking up. I’ve figured out how to make things generic and am closing in on getting this damned thing up and running so we can hook a front end to it and open our doors for business. But there are a few pieces left I haven’t really turned to yet, chiefly animal companions and inventory. I don’t anticipate either of those things being too demanding, but who knows what nightmare awaits me once I dig in. Just now I remembered that Summoners get companions that work completely differently to what’s in the core rules, so I’m sure that’s going to be a blast when I add in the Advanced Player’s Guide. Bringing the content of that book in will also mean adding in archetypes, but I’ve made provisions for those already, and don’t anticipate that being too painful. Fortunately, adding that book in is a task for post launch. Minimum viable product and all that!

What Else is Going On

If that’s all I’d gotten done in the past month, I would be pretty disappointed, but thankfully it isn’t. I’ve put together a development kit that will let me prototype some electronics projects and I’ve started doing the education work to learn game development. For now all I’ll say is that my embedded development is going to involve ST Micro’s ARM microcontrollers and Visual Studio and game development is going to start out with the Godot engine. I’m sure I’ll find time to talk about some of this stuff in the days ahead.

If you made it this far, then thanks for reading.

 

Well, the last few weeks have proven a little hectic, and put the schedule off a bit, but I’m back to it and the ship should be righted soon. Having been away, I decided I wanted to really get some work done on this site to get things into a ‘not so embarrassed to show the public’ state. I think that’s taken care of now. Here’s what it took to get there:

1. Get an SSL certificate

I’m not going to pretend like I’m a wizard with this stuff, because I’m obviously not. I knew that I needed to get my site set up for https connections. Again, this was pretty easy to do with Namecheap. You just purchase an SSL certificate, use the cPanel to hook it into your domain, and voila! You are now considered reputable for some definition of reputable.

Pretty easy to get set up, but I have to admit I’m a little surprised at how much it cost. It’s only $10/year, but that seems kind of steep to me. That’s what I’m paying for hosting right now. Oh well, it’s not going to break the bank or anything, and it gives me and any potential readers some piece of mind that people aren’t sniffing traffic to the site. Don’t want the hackers to know you’re reading such subversive material.

2. Get the Basic Layout Put Together

If you’re on this site, it’s no secret to you that I’m not a design wizard. At the best of times I could be considered competent for an engineer. I have a pretty solid artistic bent, but it’s always been towards writing and music, not visual arts. So this is the part that takes the most work for me and yields the least results.

All said I think I have a decent set up going for the site. It’s just the default WordPress theme, admittedly, but it looks okay to me. I’ve got some pictures up that are something other than my beagle, which is an improvement, but I’d probably do well to get some better pictures as well as reduce the size somewhat. But for now they’ll do. They’ve got a little character, tell the reader a little bit about me, and let you put a face to the words.

Lastly, I’ve got the content structure set up for what I’m planning to use this site for. I’ve got the blog, a place to organize project specific details and personal and contact info set up. I should probably create a section for my resume now that I think about it, but that’s just going to take a few minutes to put together.

All in all I’m pretty happy with it. It was pretty intuitive to put together and now I’ve got my own little corner of the Internet dedicated to me. I have to admit I find the idea kind of thrilling and charming.

What’s Next?

So here we are: A nice simple site put together, and something I can check off of my to-do list. Not that work on the site is done by any means. Just off the top of my head, I can think of the following things the site would benefit from:

• Metrics: Has anybody other than me visited this site? Probably not, but if someone does, I want to catch them!
• Logging: I know logs are being kept in the background, but I’m not doing a damn thing with them. This is something I should put a little work into playing with. It could be a fun opportunity to write some python scripts to auto-generate reports for me.
• Layout Redisgn: The default template is okay, but really the site could benefit from a little TLC in the customization department. I need to have a decent way of in-lining pictures and all of that stuff too. I’m used to doing it in HTML with tables and other fun stuff, but I’m sure WordPress has an abstraction that makes all of that a lot easier.
• Pictures: Really I could use some better pictures. At least convert them to sepia so they’re properly serious…
• Project details: I need to start putting together project packets for each of the things I’m working on. It would be good to have a set format that’s some combination of design docs, source code, schematics / layout (when appropriate) and tests & characterization results.

Anyway, it’s just about at the point where I’d point to it on my resume, and might consider writing some technical articles that might appeal to a wider audience. I’ve got some ideas brewing for something like setting up an embedded development environment for programmers. I could probably get an article or two out of that at least.

Anyway, that wraps it up for today, just a quick check in to get the ball rolling again. I expect the next update will be something to do with FindFamiliar, and sometime soon I want to introduce my programmable keyboard. That should be a pretty fun project.

This time around I would like to deliver on my earlier promise to get into the details of building FindFamiliar. The site is still a long ways from ready, but I’ve shifted my focus this week more towards the actual project because I really want to get a prototype version published so I can finally have something to show for all of this work. I was hoping to make some solid gains on both this week, but I’ve lost a few days to personal issues and it has put me behind schedule. I’m hoping to make up some ground this weekend, but in the meantime, the publishing must continue! So, let’s get into it.

Overall Focus

My focus on FindFamiliar has been in two major areas: 1. Getting all of the data I need represented in database models and creating fixtures to populate the database with, and 2. Figuring out how exactly I want to implement the NPC generator and getting the code written for it.

The first of these is a solid mixture of the mundane and interesting and comes from the fact that there is a fair amount of static data that needs to represented for FindFamiliar. In essence, I need all of the details of the rulebooks available for the character generator, and there’s no good way to get it there other than manual entry for a lot of it. Granted, there are opportunities for scripting, and I’m trying to leverage these as much as I can, but the bulk of the data isn’t like that.

A good example of a scripting opportunity I took advantage of recently would be the progression of a characters base attack bonus and their saving throw bonuses. What these represent is an abstraction of a character’s martial prowess as well as their resilience to various ill-effects opponents might try to hit them with. All classes have a mixture of strength in four categories: Base Attack Bonus (BAB), as well as Fortitude, Reflex and Will saving throws. While each class has a mix and match of aptitude in these four things, each of the stats has a few progressions they follow. For BAB there is a slow, medium and fast progression, and for the saving throws there is a slow and fast progression. This means that I can write a simple script that is a lookup table of a classes progression for these four things, and then know what the bonus should be for each character class at each level, which can then be used to generate a database table containing the bonuses in these things. Nice and easy, and easily extensible. As an example, a Barbarian has a fast BAB, fast Fortitude, slow Reflex and Will. Knowing that I can crank out an entry for each of the 20 levels a character could take in Barbarian and have a nice simple lookup for each level. I’ll know that a 20th level Barbarian has a +20 BAB, +12 Fortitude, +6 Reflex and +6 Will.

A good example of the kind of thing I have to enter manually would be Feats. There are hundreds of the damned things, and they do everything from something as simple as adding static bonuses to a particular skill check to changing the way rules work. For example, metamagic feats allow characters to alter the effects of spells at the expense of making use of more of the caster’s daily spell-casting resources. Worse yet, some will add bonuses for specific circumstances, such as using a particular weapon, which would need to be accounted for on the character sheet when outfitting the NPC. It’s a PITA. But the worst thing about it is that there is no logic to it. While feats chain together, there’s no programmatic way to know what one feat will do based on it’s predecessor, at least, not in a way that you can write a script for. Short of writing a script that goes and replicates all of the details of each feat; an obviously bad idea. So instead, I get to manually fill out some of these fixtures by hand. The nice thing is that the Django Admin functionality makes it easy to fire up a test server and use that to populate the various fields for all the feats (and other models I need to create data for). But it’s a manual data entry task that is an hours long undertaking. Michael has mentioned trying to outsource it, and I’m tempted, but I also figure I’m still going to have to go through and proof-read it all, and I just don’t have a lot of confidence I’ll get decent work out of some random stranger. He could be right though, and maybe we should just cough up a little money.

At any rate, all of this is taking up a lot of time. I find it very satisfying to write a script to generate all the entries I need (I’ve got some pretty cool ones that created fixtures for weapon and armor enchantments), but am not so enthusiastic about the data entry stuff. Here’s hoping it will all be worth it some day.

On to the second part of where I’ve been putting my attention: designing the actual NPC generation. This has been an interesting puzzle to solve. It is my hope that I can write a generator that is perfectly generic, and doesn’t require a lot of if/else clauses to deal with class specific carve outs. At first glance, there is a lot of stuff that seems to be class specific. They often get bonus feats that allow them to select from specific choices, they get special abilities that other classes don’t get and which often change the way the rules function and many of them get spells, spells which have availability limited by the character class. Additionally, there are a lot of choices that all characters get to make, but which are informed by the classes they’ve taken levels in. A martial character might want to increase their strength, while a caster might go for intelligence or charisma. At first, this makes it seem like there is a ton of class specific logic, and my initial idea was to create an abstract base class that would define the API for a character generator. Then I would write a character generator for each of the classes that would inherit all of the methods of the base class and implement them with class specific logic. This seemed like a decent idea, but was going to require me to write at least 10 classes all with very similar logic, but different decisions.

I would prefer to avoid violating DRY principles here, and so instead, I’m trying to find a way to make all of my logic generic. I think I can get it to work for a large portion of the generation tool. It does involve having if/else  logic to check for all of the classes, but I’ve tried to put those decisions into helper functions to obscure it some in the primary code base. The trouble still though is the class powers that accrue as a character gains levels. These are a pain, because they sometimes change bonuses, require decisions, and inform other decisions (like feat selection). At the moment I’m planning on writing a class power utility for each of the classes. Not my favorite, but there doesn’t yet seem to be a way around it. It will have the advantage of grouping all of the common decisions together in one area and making it much easier to edit / maintain in the future. It still doesn’t feel right though. I want it to be perfectly generic if possible.

That said, I feel the seed of an idea forming. I’m hoping I can write logic that will parse all of this stuff and database models that will essentially inform the decisions the logic makes based on the character class in question. I don’t have anything substantive yet, but my goal would be to be able to just add some new entries to the database to add new character classes or sourcebooks rather than have to go and edit the code later on. It should also make maintainability a lot better. Lastly, it should speed development way up if I can pull this off. I can feel like I’m getting close, but the details haven’t quite come to me yet. I’ll be sure to share once I get there.

 

Using Pycharm With Django

The IDE I’m using for development on this project is Pycharm, published by JetBrains. They publish a community version of the application and it’s a really nice IDE. I’d highly recommend it for anyone looking for a nice Python IDE.

One sticking point I have though, is that the community edition doesn’t really support Django. This is pretty easily gotten around by using their configuration editor to set it up though. In my case, I’m using the Django test framework, so I had to set up a configuration that would invoke ‘manage.py’ (a really useful utility script supplied by Django) and run my test suite. It’s pretty easy. Basically just make sure you’re pointing to the right working directory, you’ve told Pycharm to run manage.py and you pass the correct parameters to the script. In this case, test with the directory of the app I’m developing as the working directory. You can of course do this through the shell, but I like Pycharm’s debugging tools, and using this method lets me continue using them.

Concerns about Python & Django

One concern I have for this project is that, as Michael pointed out, this is a fairly processing heavy application compared to many web apps. We’re not just fetching news articles and displaying them for the user, as was the original use case for Django, but are doing a fair bit of decision making each time a person creates a character. I’ll have to get it all set up and under load before I can make any conclusions, but I’m worried that the app might get bogged down if a lot of people are all creating characters.

Still, that would be a good problem to have, and we can look at making changes to it if needs be. For now, I’m going to forge ahead. Hopefully soon I’ll have my database all set up and my perfectly generic logic written.

Having managed to successfully upload a new, albeit simple, home page for my freshly purchased website, I decided it was time to aim a little higher, and get a real site published. My initial thought was that I would throw something together in Django, not because it was the fastest path to putting up a site, but just to continue working with the platform. Frankly, publishing a blog / mostly static site is a much easier task than the NPC generator, and it would be nice to have something I can display publicly to support my claims.

Sadly, this was not to be. Long story short, Namecheap does not have Django installed on their shared hosting servers. My options were to either move to a more expensive plan (I’d rather not right now) or to follow the instructions posted here to install it myself using virtualenv. I was tempted, but for the fact that Namecheap doesn’t make any promises about it working, and it was starting to look like I might be wading into a quagmire.

Instead, I chose to go with the practical decision, and Michael’s advice, and just install WordPress. The goal, after all, is to put up a personal website as a combination resume & place to write my thoughts. It turns out just shrugging and installing WordPress is stupidly easy. Using the control panel supplied by Namecheap it was just a matter of changing the PHP version to 7.0 (again, Michael’s advice) and then installing the latest version of WordPress, again through the control panel. All told it probably took me like five minutes. You could probably do it faster if you didn’t bother to read anything.

Once WordPress was deployed, I started poking around. Say this for WordPress, you can figure out most of the basic stuff just by clicking around and paying attention. It wasn’t long before I had figured out how to add / remove pages, edit content and post blog entries. I havne’t tried doing anything to the overall style of the site yet, but I did purge the images of food (lest someone mistake me for a hipster) and replace them with pictures of our dog and digital sweet nothings for the GF. Again, a man takes his brownie points where he can get them. And who wouldn’t want to see huge pictures of our beagle? Put your hand down.

All told, getting all this up and running was pretty easy and fun. The same goes for setting up my email accounts (except it was especially fun). The last outstanding thing I need to take care of are my site certificates, and I should probably switch to https. I keep getting complaints that the certificates are invalid, so I need to look into setting all of that up. I’m hoping there’s just a configuration option or something I need to turn on with Namecheap.

Once that’s solved, it’s a matter of designing the site to serve its purpose (though I’m tempted to squirrel the current version away somewhere for posterity’s sake). Then I can start linking to it and spamming it around. Fun!

Lastly, a word about the Python / Django project. I’m still working on it, rest assured. It’s currently in a phase where I’m doing a lot of work setting up the database. This is mostly just data entry. So far as I know, there isn’t any good digital copy of all the bits and pieces that I can parse through to sift out what I need. Boy don’t I wish there was. Granted, the d20PFSRD is (or was?) a thing, but it feels dirty to do something like lift their database for my own use. I guess I could ask if they’d mind, but at this point, I’m so far into doing the way I have been, I may as well finish (textbook sunk cost fallacy!).

At any rate, I’m getting to the point where I can shift from the DB to developing the API for the front end to call into and the site can start producing actual effects that would make it worth publishing. I think I’m going to curtail some of my original targets for the sake of getting a prototype out there sooner, and I’ll talk about that some at a later point. Basically, there should be something coming…soon.

Okay, so here it goes. I’ve decided I’m going to put up a website. While I’ve got quite a bit of work done for my original project idea, there’s still quite a bit left to do. There’s also a lot left to learn, much of which can be done in tandem with the core work I’m doing on the project.

So, here’s the plan for now: I’ve got a decent handle on Django, but I’m still missing knowledge of some pretty key issues that I’m going to need to figure out. And I mean basic stuff.

Today’s problem: How do I actually put something on the Internet so that people other than me can view it in their browser (and without compromising my home network)? If you’re reading this, we can all safely assume I’ve succeeded.

The Setup: So, I’ve gone ahead and purchased hosting from Namecheap. I bought my domain names from them and they seem nice enough, so what the hell. There are probably better choices, but in this case I’m just putting up a simple personal site, and if Namecheap can’t handle that then I’d be shocked. I bought the domain name for the site (where you’re reading this) as well, and the total was something like $20 for the year. Not too shabby.

The first step was to just upload a simple html file that would resolve when navigating to my freshly purchased domain: www.richard-smart.com. Looking at the documentation from Namecheap, they recommend using an FTP server, though they provide several other options. I’ve used FTP before, so I figured I’d just go with that, and installed Filezilla. I had to set up an FTP account using cPanel (this seems to be the hosting tool provided by Namecheap, but I’m not really sure, and haven’t bothered to look into it yet).

Some things that jumped out at me during the process of setting up an FTP account: Namecheap automatically creates default FTP accounts that you can’t delete (but that I could have used). I found this mildly irritating because 1. They didn’t mention that in the linked guide and 2. they provide you a username and password which it doesn’t look like I change. I hope I’m wrong about it, because I don’t love being emailed account credentials and then being unable to change those credentials. As I type it, it occurs to me that I must be able to change them. It’s madness otherwise.

Anyway, the process of setting the account up is simple enough, though a touch vague. Anything I want to appear publicly has to go into the ‘public_html’ folder, but it’s a little unclear when I create the FTP account if I have to give access to that folder specifically or something above it. I have a lot of questions, like: Do I even need to do this? (I don’t think so), what directory should I give the account access to? (I mirrored the admin account) and can I change the account’s access if I get it wrong? (I think so). But I’ve got a mission to accomplish, and refuse to be sidetracked. Beyond the bevy of questions, setting things up is easy enough and Filezilla is quite easy to use. Flush with victory I upload my newly created ‘index.html’ with a loving message to my girlfriend and go back to my browser to refresh the page.

I hit F5, and waited with bated breath. Moments later, up comes…Namecheap’s default landing page. I had assumed ‘index.html’ would be the default, and quickly verify that should be true. A few minutes of reading, and I find myself on a page explaining how to change some configuration files, which looks easy enough, but lucky for me, some helpful commenter pointed out that this is usually because of browser caching, and deleting my browser history will fix the problem.

I give it a shot, and presto chango! My professed undying love is displayed for all the world to see. Naturally I email the link to my girlfriend (I paid good money for that site, you’re damn right I’m going to get some brownie points out of it!), and kick back in my chair.

I’m happy that I managed to get it all working. I’ve taken the first step, and an important one! But already my mind has turned to the next task: How do I get it to run a process…

Welcome to the inaugural post of my new blog. In short, this post, and all that follows will be about programming. Well, mostly that I think. More specifically, it will be about learning new programming skills. Even more specifically, it will be about learning how to build a RESTful web app and working with the Django web framework for Python. At least at first. I’m sure I’ll move on to new topics soon enough. I’m usually studying several different subjects at once, and I’m sure I’ll want to write about some of them at some point.

I’m not new to programming, but I have never done anything for the web. As an electrical engineer, most of the tools I work with are low level, or at best, for the desktop. Mostly we concern ourselves with making LEDs blink. Publishing things to the web is just not something that lands on my plate often. But I want to get better at it, and delve into it more.

There are already a lot of blogs, a lot of really great blogs, covering everything about programming and Python, and they are a great source of information. I am not aiming to add much to that pool of knowledge; how could I? Instead, I’m looking to offer a source of commiseration. I’m going to do my best to update my progress and thoughts on my learning and project every week in the hopes that somebody out there finds a kindred spirit or a touch of relief in finding out that they’re not the only one. And maybe, just maybe, one day I’ll write a post that teaches somebody something. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I also need to add that this post was written some time ago, and just recently revised before being published. I started working with Django some time ago and would chip away at it here and there. I would take vacation days and just work on it. But, as so often happens to side projects, it started to languish. I would resurrect it from time to time and work on it more, but it was mostly back-burnered. The project has taken a lot longer than I expected largely due to getting caught up in other hobbies, as well as having a hard time working all day and coming home and working some more. I love programming, but I have a lot of other activities I enjoy, so tacking on two more hours of development at the end of the day was a struggle for me a lot of the time.

Anyway, I’ve tried to revise this post, but if the tone seems a little weird, now you have some idea why. I promise I’ll be more coherent in the future.

About my project

So, the best way to learn is by doing. Sometimes. And so, I’m working with my friend Michael (who’s name was changed from Michael to protect him) on building a SaaS project. In brief, the project is intended to be a marriage between my love of tabletop RPGs and technical projects (in this case web development).

One sentence summary: We are building a web app that will provide a number of tools and random generators that will reduce the prep time for all the overworked gamemasters in the world significantly each week. In return, they will give us money. All their money! Muahahaha…wait no. Michael informs me it will only be some money. Color me disappointed.

So that’s the dream anyway.

To begin with, we’re looking at creating an NPC (Non Player Character) generator for the Pathfinder roleplaying system. These are the various supporting characters a person running a game might use to flesh out their stories, and sometimes they need stats for those characters. The problem? Making those characters can become a major pain. It can be time consuming and complicated, and as the game gets more advanced, the work to create those characters grows.

Our goal is to remove that pain point. The idea is that while the characters will be randomly generated, the character creation algorithm will make coherent decisions so that while the generated characters might be odd, and poorly optimized, they won’t be useless and should be both unique and interesting.

The difficulty in building this is that making characters in Pathfinder is based around a set of rules that are then bent, broken or ignored as the characters advance in power. Basically, it’s a system defined by exceptions to the rules. This makes it a pain to try and write generalized algorithms that aren’t full of conditionals and carve-outs.

Why Python and Django?

I’ll keep this pretty short. We chose Python because it is a language I wanted to learn, and it has a lot of general usefulness for me professionally, and frankly, is just a great language. While the project has languished some over time, I have been using Python at work routinely for various things, like task automation and testing, and have pretty much fallen in love with it.

Once the decision to use Python was made it was pretty much a choice between Django and Flask. A good case can be made for either, so we elected to go with the one with a cooler name (sorry Flask, good but not good enough). In all seriousness, Django has a strong community, good release cycle, a lot of built in functionality and good online docs. But I won’t pretend it wasn’t a fairly arbitrary decision. We were both noobs as far as Python is concerned when the project was first started, and we had to pick one, so we did.

There’s also a bunch of other stuff we’re using that I know nothing about. That’s Michael’s domain. I should probably mention that he’s a web developer already, of the PHP persuasion. One of my short term project goals is to get up to speed with what he’s been doing. Once I get there, I’ll talk more about that portion of the technology stack.

About me

I guess it’s probably a good idea to share some information about myself. Out here, on the the Internet. For all of you lovely people.

Let’s start at the beginning. I was born in a small city by the name of Portland, Maine and…Nah, just kidding. But a little bit about me for context: I’m an electrical engineer with a minor in computer science. I also hold a writing degree (well, Media Studies with a writing concentration if you’re nitpicking), and am a native, and recent expatriate, of Maine, or the least known province of Canada as far as most are probably concerned. I moved to Raleigh a few weeks ago, as of the time I’ve published this, and have been settling in to my new (much warmer!) city.

In Maine, I worked at a semiconductor company and an industrial automation company. Both were old guard companies where I got to work with some great people and work on some interesting projects, but ultimately neither of them was quite what I was looking for.  The same goes for the employment climate in Maine.

Now I’m in Raleigh. I’m still looking for work, and while I’ve got the freedom that comes with being unemployed, I figure it’s time to start working on my project again and bring some of these ideas to fruition, including putting up this site. Writing is a long lost love of mine, and I’d love to make it part of my weekly (though probably not daily) routine again.

Getting a little personal: I feel like I’m at another one of those crossroads you come to in life. There are a lot of ways to jump, and the easy one is rarely the one you should take. There are opportunities for electrical engineers in my new home city, but there are a lot of opportunities for software developers, and if I’m being honest, I find software to be far more interesting work. Engineering is great, but it also comes with a lot of tedious tasks. I don’t know that I’ve ever enjoyed doing layout reviews or Bill of Materials reviews. But they’re so crucially important that you can’t afford to give them anything other than your full attention.

I’d like to shift course in my career at this point, but so far I’ve been having a bit of a tough time. There’s more competition in this market, I don’t have a social network yet and on paper there are a lot more people who look better than me. I think I’ve got good programming chops, but the challenge right now is just getting people to talk to me. So I need to prove myself, and I can’t think of a better way than having something to show.

So here I am, living in a new city, looking for a job and no other major demands on my time. I need a way to convince people I’m worth talking to, and I’ve got what I think is a good project idea. There’s nothing for it but to begin…again.

Here we go.