#schmutz #ramble #videoGames #totk

Tears of the Kingdom Speedruns

I beat the main story the other day as I mentioned in the last post I was sort of racing to do. Most of my entertainment comes from Twitch.tv and most of the streamers I watch have been playing Tears of the Kingdom, so in order to avoid spoilers I wanted to finish the game so I could go back to watching streams. Kind of silly, but whatever!

I’m glad I did either way because today I got to watch the new any% world record by Samura1man live! Cool stuff! (Possible spoilers here, read with caution) The run is really neat and just recently the route stopped grabbing the paraglider and relies on a brand new fall damage cancel glitch. The route also makes uses of the new duplication glitch which allows the player to duplicate held items by jumping then pressing b+y while holding the items to be duplicated. It seems like people are pretty hopeful for some sort of skew glitch to be found which would probably allow for the ascend ability to be broken in half. Looking forward to watching how these runs evolve!

I also found a runner today who was running the Great Sky Island category, which is essentially just the “tutorial island” part of the game. This category doesn’t require any difficult glitches and is mostly about perfecting movement. If I ever have the time, I may try this category since I decided that as much as I want to, the Metroid Dread speedrun is a bit too rough on my hands.

Skill Up

As I mentioned in the last post, I am looking for a new job. I am also trying to pivot roles a bit. While my role is not “frontend developer”, that is the box I get put in by recruiters and such. That’s fine, but I’m not really a frontend developer. I work more in the middle layer between the backend and frontend. Mostly I work on tooling and starter-kits to make other developers build frontends faster. That being said, I’m trying to pivot to a backend or full-stack role.

To help facilitate this change, I have been trying to learn more “backend” skills, wahtever that even means. I can already build backends with Node.js, but apparently that is not enough for the current job market. So I am learning python and terraform and aws (I already know GCP well enough to get around). This has been fun–I’m building a discord bot that interacts with aws polly and I am planning on hosting it on an EC2 instance or maybe lambda if I can figure that out.

All of these projects are fun but to be honest they do not feel like they’re helping my resume. I am having a hard time even getting to the screening portion of the interview process. It feels like looking for my first job all over again, which sucks because I was told that once you get your first dev job, the next one is a lot easier to come by. I suppose that is technically true since I’m at my second job, but speedrunning to the title of Senior Software Engineer with 2 years of experience does not seem to help the resume.

Other Projects

Speaking of projects, there are so many projects I want to work on but I feel like I have no time, or would rather spend that time on other things (different projects or video games). One of the projects I started planning but neglected is called Jet. It is essentially going to be version 2 of the blogging platform I build (it’s how I wrote this blog you’re reading right now! Check Building My Digital Garden for details). Jet will incorporate the webmention server as well as some other things like media in the blog posts, nested dirs and linked posts, some other features I have not quite come up with yet because time. The end goal is a mini cms/static site generator of sorts that is compliant with indie web specs. We’ll see if this ever gets off the ground, but at the very least I want to improve obsidian-diy-sync in one way or another, and Jet feels like the best way to do that over a long period of time.

End

Okay, that’s nearly 750 words, which I heard is a good amount for daily writing. As I mentioned, this series of posts is meant to allow me to stretch and train my writing muscle and hopefully get better at it. Thanks for reading!