Posts on maladroit.dev

Before I Forget

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a minute since i have made one of these and honestly it’s been due to the inconvenience. I am still working on ways to make blogging frictionless, but that has been proving challenging. Especially considering I am still trying to leverage Github pages as a static site. With that all said, it’s time to shake things up a bit. One of the hardest parts about blogging is working with a blank page. The possibilities are endless and overwhelming. To counter that, I’m going to try playing around with a gimmick that will hopefully get some of the creative juices flowing. This is a little derivative of Thorsten Ball’s Register Spill format so forgive me Thorsten. Anyways, before I forget:

Initial Thoughts on JJ

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working with JJ daily for about two months now and I have some initial thoughts about it. After working with Git for over a decade, JJ was really easy to pick up.

The first thing I noticed right away was a lot of my workflow and a lot of the neovim ecosystem is very git focused. If I was going to make this work, I needed to find a suitable replacement for visual line diffs as well as a picker/finder that would let me see files that have been modified by the current revision. I wasn’t able to find existing plugins that satisfied those needs, so I wrote some minor extensions to plugins I already used. Mini.diff ware already designed with the intention to be extended to other VCS tools, so that covered diff lines. As for the picker, I took the existing git_status picker from Folke’s snacks plugin and translated it to JJ commands. It’s not perfect but it gets the job done and allows me to quickly navigate through my changes.

Bastionland

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I finally got my physical copy of Mythic Bastionland in that mail and it’s fantastic. This book has been on my mind since September of last year when a friend showed it to me for the first time. I was originally pretty skeptical because I had never played an OSR game before and my only experience was with games like 5e, Blades in the Dark, and other more modern games. My biggest hang up was character progression. It felt like it must get boring after a few sessions when you don’t get cool new spells or feats that you can use in combat. I was very wrong.

Emily

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A lot has changed in the last few months. My daughter Emily was born on March 22 and she’s pretty great. Paternity leave came and went in what felt like no time at all. Now I am back on the grind and trying to cut back on my phone usage entirely. While in the hospital, I watch Ludwig and Michael Reeves attempt to cross Japan with no map or smart phone in 14 days on YouTube. It left such a powerful impact on me that I have been working on trying to forgo using my phone entirely. I still use it for music and texting, but I am leaving it at the house more and more when I go out and favoring my pocket notebook instead.

Solo RPG

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The first few months of 2025 have been pretty solid. I managed to learn how to play Brianstorm (kinda), I read through 100 Go Mistakes and continue to study data oriented design, and I started programming in Jai after getting access to the private beta. Sure things are a little scary with my wife having a federal position and the current administration is making her life very chaotic, but she goes on maternity leave this month and gets a well deserved break from all the churn. Not to mention we are having another kid this month which is it’s own version of scary, but I am sure we will adapt to whatever challenges are thrown our way. The year of focus is off to a ripping start with some occasional setbacks to my old ways, but I’m proud of what has been accomplished thus far.

End of 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The year is nearly over and that means it’s time for a new word. I can’t remember where I stole this tradition from, probably some YouTube channel or podcast I used to listen to, but each year I like to pick just one word to define the upcoming new year. I like this approach a lot more than having a resolution because it can become more fluid and change as the year goes on.

The New Sound

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The last year was a pretty great year for music. From familiar favorites like King Gizzard, IDLES, and Jack White to artists brand new to me like Baker Boy, The Lemon Twigs, and Magdalena Bay. It was just a phenomenal year for albums and it was really difficult picking just one for my album of the year. I was stuck for the longest time on King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s “b741” and Bring Me The Horizon’s “POST HUMAN: NeX GEn” and kept flip flopping between which I liked more. Thankfully, the burden of choosing was removed when another album came out that was so remarkable it made the decision effortless.

Focus

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I saw a YouTube video earlier this week that made the claim that people today have lost the ability to focus for extended periods of time compared to people from a hundred or so years ago. I have no idea if any of that is true, but I can say from my own perspective that I have been struggling lately with staying with habits and hobbies. From weight loss to fitness to reading, it’s just been very difficult dialing in and keeping the rhythm and momentum going. I am hoping that long form journaling can at least help with this problem, that is if I can keep that habit too.

Moderation

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been trying to be more disciplined about different aspects of my life recently. I have started intermittent fasting again to try and fit into my nicer dress clothes that I haven’t worn in years. I have also setup the app ScreenZen to moderate my YouTube usage on my phone. I used to average between 4-5 hours a day which has now been cut down to just about an hour. Not too shabby.

Study habits

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have been trying to figure out new ways to encourage studying. I have been finding it exceptionally difficult recently to read/study because life has been chaotic. The dog needs played with, Dean wants to play outside, and honestly some days I am just not motivated enough to read about some new software design technique. My latest attempt at removing friction to study is annotating PDFs in GoodNotes with the intent to refine those notes into the KB. Time will tell if that actually works or if it’s another strategy that just doesn’t stick.

New job

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

First week at the new job has been incredibly refreshing. Everyone is so nice and I really love the mission statement of Bloomfield Robotics. Even if it is still the honeymoon phase, it’s good to change things up and move towards discomfort rather than staying with something you know.

Despite doing a bunch of on-boarding and being mentally drained at the end of the day, I still managed to keep up the pace with Orvash. I finally fixed the sine wave bug that was plaguing me for a few weeks. The platform layer is functional to the point where the game code can begin. I’m still work-shopping some ideas on what I want Orvash to look like, and deciding what things I am going to keep from Entree.

KB

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Not much gamedev progress in the last week, it’s been a bit hectic since I’m starting a new job. I have spent some time updating my knowledge-base though and thought it would be interesting to write about.

I have a notes site at kb.maladroit.dev that is GitHub pages site consisting of all my notes I have taken in the last few years. This repository was originally created for keeping my notes in Obsidian, but after a few months of that I realized I just preferred markdown instead. Some annoying hurdles to deal with were Jekyll not supporting mermaid tables, how to manage subdomains with Github, reorganizing all my notes to play nicer with jekyll, and getting a search bar working. All of which were easily fixed with a mixture of coffee, stack overflow, and swearing.

Square wave to the dome

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing quite as sobering as taking a 440 hz square wave right to the dome. After fiddling for just over an hour by adjusting the volume, frequency, period, and reading the new SDL3 documentation, I realized that I didn’t have my AudioStream bound to any AudioDevice.

fn SDLInitAudio() !void {
 const srcSpec = c.SDL_AudioSpec{
 .format = c.SDL_AUDIO_S16,
 .channels = 1,
 .freq = 48000,
 };
 const dstSpec = c.SDL_AudioSpec{
 .format = c.SDL_AUDIO_F32,
 .channels = 2,
 .freq = 48000,
 };

 const audioDeviceId = c.SDL_OpenAudioDevice(c.SDL_AUDIO_DEVICE_DEFAULT_PLAYBACK, &dstSpec);
 if (audioDeviceId == 0) {
 c.SDL_LogError(c.SDL_LOG_CATEGORY_APPLICATION, "%s", c.SDL_GetError());
 return error.SDLOpenAudioDevice;
 }

 audioStream = c.SDL_CreateAudioStream(&srcSpec, &dstSpec);
 if (audioStream == null) {
 c.SDL_LogError(c.SDL_LOG_CATEGORY_APPLICATION, "%s", c.SDL_GetError());
 return error.SDLCreateAudioStream;
 }

 const success = c.SDL_BindAudioStream(audioDeviceId, audioStream);
 if (!success) {
 c.SDL_LogError(c.SDL_LOG_CATEGORY_APPLICATION, "%s", c.SDL_GetError());
 return error.SDLBindAudioStream;
 }
}

Now that I have the volume lowered from 30k to 2k, I now have keyboard, gamepad, video, and sound all working for SDL3 using Zig by following alongside Casey Muratori’s Handmade Hero series.