Monthly Review: January 2023

As I write this post, I realize it’s been almost a whole YEAR since I’ve done a Monthly Review – just shy of 3 months! I even had the following month’s post half completed, sitting in drafts collecting dust 😅 WELLL, its the start of a brand new year, something about new beginnings and best intentions, so I will work on being more consistent going forward!

Also having a moment of deja-vu as the last post announced the news of a website revamp.. and wouldn’t you know it, this post ALSO mentions a website revamp! Maybe every month I just need to redo the entire site – you know, a theme for every month! Keeping it fresh and exciting! That sounds exhausting, soooo instead I will be making some minor changes here and there and commit to posting haha.

Without further adieu, let’s jump into the Monthly Review for January 2023!

SullyGnome Stats

I avoid spending too much energy looking at stats like follower counts since most of this is out of my control, but I do still do enjoy keeping track of this and being open about my streaming journey!

Twitch Bot

For those who’ve not tuned in for awhile, I’ve now entered my programming-stream phase. 🤖 I started live learning C# in November 2022 in a quest to code a TwitchBot myself!

IT HAS HAPPENED! On the very last day of January, I FINALLY got KoishiBot connected to Twitch! 🥳

Okay sure, it’s not the first time I’ve done this – at the start of December I got the first iteration of the bot to authenticate and connect to Twitch. Regardless, both times were super exciting as a bby programmer! So what happened with the first bot you ask? Once we celebrated the win, I immediately started a brand new project file to learn how to setup MVVM architecture in WPF haha.

I spent a lot of time going through several of SingletonSean’s WPF series on YouTube. To no fault of Sean’s, I apparently find it difficult to stick with a tutorial series from start to finish. Or precisely following instructions without needing to make some modifications 🙃 And then proceed to struggle to follow along with my slightly modified code example while tackling advance topics like Dependency Injection.

Jumping straight into making a large application with only the basic understanding of C# probablyyy isn’t the smartest thing to do BUT I was filled with determination and drive to make it work! 😤

I had a general idea of how I wanted my bot application to work and look like. I had a fancy schema drawn up: I wanted multiple windows. I wanted a database with multiple tables. I wanted multiple buttons to press…with feedback of course! Huge shoutout to pushqrdx for introducing me to Excalidraw – I love using it to sketch elaborate mockups, as seen below LOL

The trouble is – there are so many design patterns, so many different tools, so many fancy terms and a heck ton of strong opposing opinions all things code. It made it difficult to know what to do, especially when at least once a stream I’d get asked: “Why C#?”

SO I accidentally acquired a mentor! I don’t think BraveCobra knew what he was signing up for when he offered to hop on a stream voice call to walk me through a design pattern. He’s (willingly? LOL) been on stream several times since then to help answer my many questions and provide lots of valuable insight! I’d still be fumbling around without much direction if it wasn’t for his help, which I’m super grateful for. Maybe one day we’ll get around to learning about the much talked about ✨ UNIT TESTING ✨ and [ FACTS ]

New WordPress Theme

With the shenanigans in recent months regarding social media, I’ve had a renewed interest in the IndieWeb. I’ve really wanted to focus on putting content on my website first and linking out to social media instead. In typical ADHD fashion, after I scrambled to complete my last website overhaul in April 2022 thanks to the pressure of renewal deadlines, I immediately abandoned working on my website to focus on other projects 😅

In December, I was greeted by an announcement explaining that the theme I purchased was no longer being supported in 2023 in favor of going the subscription service route. While a shame, it gave me a good excuse to finally rid myself of the blocky, bloated, cookie cutter WP themes to make something super simple from scratch. This of course meant learning how to setup a local environment with Laragon, understanding the basics of PHP, CSS and Bootstrap… oh, while coding a TwitchBot at the same time!

Even with the fancy modern designs and trendy features, I just wanted something that reminded me of early 2000s iframe layouts.. that _begrudgingly worked nicely on mobile (lol 📵). I gathered design & content organization inspiration from sites like Marzka, Hacdias, CamPegg that I discovered while exploring the IndieWeb Webring and Neocities directory.

Anddd I made this little site! All thanks to the many resources kind internet strangers have provided! It was extremely satisfying to see code I wrote work properly… or you know, finally getting it to work after many hours of troubleshooting 😆. There is still plenty of things I’d like to improve on and pages to add – of course – so this site will always be a work in progress. However, unlike previous attempts to keep up with a website, I feel like it’s definitely a space I’m proud of and want to continue to publish content to.. SO MANY PLANS!

I’ve already started using this space to post my Stream Summaries – little end of stream recaps I would write for myself and anyone who we missed that day. I’ve been writing them since 2017, but they were only viewable exclusively on my Discord. Now my posts get to live publicly on my website! Nicely organized, easier to read, and best of all: no more dreading if (or when?) the app catches on fire one day and everyone abandons ship, that I’ll loose all my work 😎🔥 Though.. I suppose I should look into exporting my old ones..

LudumDare 52

Last noteworthy thing from January was streaming LudumDare 52! This event marked the return of LD being hosted 3 times a year.. a triannual? event! However, with the timing (and perhaps the winning theme: Harvest 👨‍🌾), I opted to not enter this event and to only dedicate one day of my stream schedule to play & review games.

Despite my hesitation of the theme, I was pleasantly surprised that not all the games I tried were farming simulators – two of my favorites being DokiDoki Ninjin & Hex-Yield. In total, I played through 23 games in about 8 hours!

For LudumDare 53 in April, I may consider adjusting my schedule and process of playing games to be able to provide better feedback and engagement for developers. Oh, and definitely make my game submission rules more clear that games featuring adult content is not allowed and that a tiny “viewer discretion” line on the start screen is not an adequate content warning 🙃

For February, I want to keep my goals simple:

– FINALLY get a version of KoishiBot running on stream that, at minimum, keeps track of viewers attendance streak by reading & writing to a database.

– Add at least one new page on the website – an FAQ regarding coding or a Uses page

– Consistently post Stream Summaries on the website, not missing a day in February 🤞

– Finish Dan’s website theme

And that’s a wrap for this monthly review. Thanks for reading kois, lets achieve all our goals in February and have a fantastic month!