Work
This week I started looking at adding Sorbet, a Ruby typechecker, to some of the code my team owns after another developer did the legwork getting it to simply run against our monolith.
I’ve picked one small component and got that to typed: true, meaning Sorbet is checking everything (though, it’s dynamically typing everything at the moment) and it already found something we could fix: a reference to a non-existent class inside some code that turned out to be dead (good thing too, since if that code had ever been called it would have failed).
Next step is to start adding type signatures and refactoring the code to pass around typed structs rather than hashes, and eventually get it all to typed: strict.
But more on that later, as I have taken next week off.
Books
No books this week!
I’ve got a couple of things on the go I hope to make good progress on during my week off.
Roleplaying Games
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha
This week was character creation, we have:
Varghast, a chariot driver for the Taraling clan, in the Orlanth Adventurous cult. He’s driven by honour, a hatred of the Lunar Empire, and a strong affinity to the Air and Water runes. He’s also an anthropomorphic duck-man.
Ferenasa, an Issaries merchant, also of the Taraling clan, with no strong passions other than a love for her family. She’s also really good with an axe.
It took us about 3 hours, with much consulting of the book, but we had fun: the lifepath segment of character creation ended up with both of the characters’ parents and grandparents dying horrible deaths, one even had their soul devoured. So next week we’re actually playing the game.
Here’s the pitch I sent out:
You will be playing adventurers from Sartar, a largeish kingdom in the Dragon Pass region of Glorantha. You’ll all be members of, or associated with, the same clan, and will be asked by your clan’s chief to go help out the neighbouring Varmandi clan who are having trouble with two saber-toothed cats menacing the sacred cattle the Varmandi look after for the tribal Orlanth temple. Wouldn’t want to displease the gods by not being able to provide an appropriate sacrifice, and even better if the Varmandi end up in your clan’s debt.
I’m not sure if we’ll complete the scenario in our usual three-hour slot, since there’s a lot of mechanics to learn. But on the other hand the scenario is very straightforward. So we’ll see, I might see if we can extend it to four hours just this once.
Miscellaneous
I picked up Aliens: Dark Descent on Thursday.
The basic gameplay is very X-COM-like, where you send squads of soldiers out on anti-alien missions from an upgradable home base, and where individual soldiers gain experience and can unlock new abilities. But with a few differences that make it interesting. It’s real-time rather than turn-based, the tactics are more squad-focussed where you don’t really control individual soldiers to the same extent as you do in X-COM, and the story is obviously fairly different.
Maybe I’ll spend all next week playing this instead of reading books…