Dev blog

Posted on 30 October 2025

Every few years, usually when I’m sick and can’t concentrate on proper work, I redesign this website. My ideal website would be no website, but even in this day and age it’s sort of obligatory for someone in my lines of work to have a place to dump their CV and some links to stuff they’ve done. Either that or it’s the sunk cost fallacy of having had this domain for about 20 years and not wanting to let go. Running a close second would be the simplest possible website, just a few bits of HTML and CSS with no database, no javascript and no CMS backend to maintain and patch. This yearning reached its zenith when I was doing ‘proper’ web dev professionally - building full-stack custom platforms for clients while the web dev world’s horrifying reliance on brittle packaging systems and quickly evolving framework hype trains started to really snowball in the mid-2010s.

Up until now I was hosting my very simple static HTML+CSS site on Firebase, mostly because I couldn’t be bothered to figure out GitHub Pages’ Jekyll implementation but also because I didn’t need to update it at any frequency greater than…annually-ish. Perhaps even less. When you’re working on games industry projects for years at a time, and almost everything is under NDA, there’s often nothing you can say about them. The catalyst for this latest overhaul (other than catching a chest infection and wanting to faff about with Jekyll as a form of low stakes non-work therapy) was that I thought it might be nice to occasionally make dev blog posts based on things I’ve learnt, bugs I’ve solved, and rationales for design/engineering strategies that I’ve arrived at in my work. If someone chances upon it in a desperate search result while experiencing some niche problem that I already managed to solve, great!

As for GitHub Pages/Jekyll - I like it, I think? I initially resented having to install Ruby for a local dev environment but it’s fine; the whole Liquid templating/logic thing gives me nice Tumblr vibes (oldskool Tumblr, not modern day, we’ll-inject-ads-into-your-blog Tumblr), and it’s nice to work locally in markdown and publish static pages with a git push to a server for whose security someone else is responsible.

I’ve catered for some basics like inline code and code snippets with syntax highlighting:

bool getIsTrue(const bool bVal)
{
    return bVal;
}

and that’s probably all I’ll need. Maybe the occasional image or YouTube video.

Like that.