Blazoring a New Trail

So, I've got a new project I'm working on with an old friend. That, plus my circumstances, are leading me to basically learning a lot of new material in a relatively short time, and it's been a lot of fun so far after about a week into the process.

Much of my learning and experimenting so far has been with Blazor, C#, and .NET, which is what the project will require. To that end, I'm doing some courses in Blazor, C#, and eventually going to branch out and finally (about time, eh?) learn how to use Docker to deploy stuff.

Blazor is awesome! It reminds me of my experience with React.JS, but... easier? Less fiddley? Maybe it's just that I have more dev experience under my belt now than a few years ago when I was first learning React.

At any rate, when learning a new library, framework, language, or anything along those lines, my biggest judgement is basically the power vs. ease-of-use tradeoff. Blazor seems to be a nice balance: not too complicated, but thorough enough to do damn near anything you can think of in its wheelhouse. When a new tool makes me feel powerful as a developer, it's obviously doing something right.

Changing gears: in addition to essentially diving into this project full-time, I've been playing a lot of Splintered, available on Steam. It's a highly affordable indie dev game heavily inspired by the original Dragon Warrior and other early RPGs, but includes a built-in randomizer and some QoL stuff not seen in the games that inspired it. It's great fun, and though it's only been released for a week or two now, there's already a small but active scene for racing the randomizer. To that end, I decide to have my newfound Blazor skills cross-over and help players by coding up a tracker-webapp that keeps track of what items in the randomizer you've already obtained, and has a notes page for anything you'd like to note.

Turned out pretty good for two days of free-time work. I'll probably improve it, make it more full-featured, etc. as I get more Blazor experience under my belt, but for now it's cool to have already created a tool that I myself find useful and solves a problem (or at least, fits a niche). Anyway, I'm off to learn more Blazor, play more Splintered, or get more sleep: I haven't decided yet. Maybe I'll code up a tool that decides for me.