A backend engineer with zero game dev experience picked up Godot 4 and built a horror FPS from scratch — procedural audio, volumetric fog, enemy AI state machines, the whole thing. Then a 13-year-old played it for two minutes, grabbed a tablet, and decided she’s designing every monster, boss, and piece of lore. The game just got a creative director.
The pitch is irresistible — per-PR environments, live links, instant feedback. Then someone needs twenty restarts to get a multi-service stack running, and the pitch meets operational reality.
Your CI pipeline is building the same Docker image three times per run, a dependency bot just DDoS’d your runner fleet, and nobody’s going to fix it — because nobody owns it. How shared pipelines corrode without a single bad decision.
Production has dashboards, alerts, and structured logging. Your test environment has SSH. Your CI runners have a re-run button. That gap is quietly eating your engineering velocity alive.
Most languages ship tooling years after the compiler. I built the Yar IntelliJ plugin in parallel with the compiler itself — 19 commits tracking language changes in real time. Here’s why DX-first language development changes how you think about design.
Implementing a garbage collector for the Yar compiler meant scanning the stack without knowing what’s a pointer. Mark-and-sweep, conservative scanning via setjmp, heap growth targeting, and the fun part: making it work when threads are running.
When the Yar compiler couldn’t import code across project boundaries, I had to build a package manager from nothing. Git-based fetching, alias-based imports, content-addressed caching, transitive resolution — and zero registry. Here’s every decision that mattered.
Four months ago I asked ChatGPT a dumb question while walking my dog. It told me building a programming language wasn’t that hard. So I built one — a compiled language with explicit error handling, generics, structured concurrency, and a garbage collector. Here’s what happened.
· music
I thought streaming was the ethical upgrade from piracy. Turns out it just made music disposable. Now I buy CDs, pirate FLACs, and actually listen to albums again.
· go
Why I built mokapot — a single Go binary that speaks SQS and SNS well enough for real AWS SDKs to connect without configuration changes. Persistence, filter policies, and the tricky parts of faking a cloud service locally.
