
This is my first blog post in my new "creative" website.

Originally my site was a free HTML template that I tweaked to fit my purpose.

But it had no flair!

I was so caught up in trying to make things perfect that I created a boring site and never managed to add anything I want

I always thought things had to be 100% perfect, use the latest web frameworks, be accessible, have CI/CD pipelines etc.

I lost sight at what the web was for...

About how I started my journey in the first place...

So I ripped it all up and started from scratch.

I'm writing the HTML pages directly. I don't even care about styling right now or reducing effort.

All I care about is having a place to express myself creatively using my passion of software development.

This is what I have...

**And it's liberating. :D**


Creative Freedom


Here is our dog Crumble

<img src="/images/blog/crumble.jpg" />

I had the idea of making a homage to him in RTGames Minecraft world server.

I am not the best Minecraft builder however so I spent a lot of time thinking of how I would represent him in the voxel game.

My initial thought was to create a 3D model of him. Pass it through a Voxelizer and then build in on the server.

That idea was going to fail though. Taking a 3D model of an active puppy was near impossible and even then the end result wasn't really what I wanted...

<img width={"100%"} src="/images/blog/crumble-model.png" />

As you can see in the above image it is a very big build but the colours are off and it's doesn't capture him.

NOTE: To do this I used [Smoothie-3D](https://www.smoothie-3d.com/site/page_index.php) to turn a still image into a 3D model of him and [Drububu Voxelizer](https://www.drububu.com/miscellaneous/voxelizer/index.html?out=obj) to convert it into Minecraft (and then fixed the colours a bit myself manually with creative mode and World Edit.)

Why was I spending time with this convoluted method when I miss the point completely. I want to have Crumble on the Minecraft server.

So why don't I JUST DO THAT?

So I did, I'm not the best builder but I can try...

And in 2 hours work (including writing this). He is now at the North Pole on RT Game's Minecraft Server :)

<img width={"100%"} src="/images/blog/crumble-rt-1.png" />
<img width={"100%"} src="/images/blog/crumble-rt-2.png" />
<img width={"100%"} src="/images/blog/crumble-rt-3.png" />

Crumble in Minecraft


Today I was playing around with some Stable Diffusion (more on that in a future post!) and I realised how impatient I had become to software runs taking time.

Doing Stable Diffusion requires a lot of processing power and when you can't scale this without incurring costs (and it being unnecessary to scale); then you must wait for the process to complete.

Part of the training I was doing took greater than 30 minutes and generating images can take a couple of minutes per run. On the grand scheme of things this is not a long time but where I am used to near instant feedback on computations it made me reflect on my perception on this as a whole.

In addition, recently we have added a video to one of our products. The video takes about 5 seconds to load due to its size. Many of us internally noted this delay because of how much it stood out from the norm. We are so used to videos loading in seconds. Sites loading in milliseconds. We have benchmarks and SEO rankings purely based on page load times. It's so ingrained into our psyche now and it wasn't always this way. When we had dial-up we would have loved 5 second load times. As technology advances and improves we always demand more.

As a software engineer I pride myself in ensuring I write efficient logic. Can I save a few milliseconds here? How can I make it faster to deploy? What can I do to reduce cold start times? I'm always trying to find the possible improvements to optimise for this vector (amongst others).

So naturally when something takes a substantial time it sticks out to me like a sore thumb and my mind starts to think on how to optimise it?

But the thing is. Do I need to? I'm only running the model a handful of times and it's not even that long a duration to wait. Sure if this was a production app, used millions of times a day then it starts to make sense. But if I spend an hour saving 2 minutes on the run time I've actually lost time.

I think I have a temptation to automate and optimise and I am learning to get a balance between action and inaction for these.

Sometimes the best thing to do is wait, take a break and learn to live with the loading bar.


Living with the loading bar


I was inspired to write this blog post after a evening stroll.

I tend to take a lot of inspiration and philosophy from non-software disciplines such as architecture, civil engineering and other engineering disciplines.

On my evening walk for some reason I acknowledged the streetlights more than I usually would. Many are out and it causes there to be long stretches of darkness on the road. As I walked I observed them more and noticed that they varied so much. Some made of concrete, some out of metal others attached to telegraph poles or trees. Even the lamp itself varied in brightness, colour and bulb type.

These streetlights have been here for many years and the streets themselves have changed over time. The streetlamps being so varied made me reflect on how they are maintained and improved. With them being so varied they must be maintained individually. Replacing only when something needs changing or is broken.

I thought of the engineer who would come out to these streetlights and repair them. Do they see an streetlight that has been running for many years and get an urge to update it? Do they get frustrated about the way things were done when it was first installed? Do they grumble and complain about how things have improved since then?

The same mentality is present in software engineering. Many teams will have some form of "Legacy". I always thought of legacy as a positive word. "This is the legacy I will leave" e.t.c. In the context of software engineering, however, the term 'legacy' is generally seen as negative.

The reason being is that this legacy code is the streetlights when they were first installed. The person who installed them has moved on and technology has moved on too. Over years of neglect and underresourcing the applications becomes a burden to the team. The team now want to get rid of it as fast as they can. Security patches and simple bug fixes are painful because there are no tests, no documentation and no one knows how it works.

What we have to remember is that we are also building this legacy. We may not be around in the same role 5-10 years from now when what we are working on right now is being neglected.

We may like to believe we are using the latest technology and building more maintenable applications but regardless it will still be viewed as legacy one day. Trends change and things move on.

For that reason should we care about the quality of what we build? I would say yes but being mindful. Perfection is an unobtaionable goal. At the end of the day your software won't live forever. How can you build it in a way that is quick and maintainable for the period of time your users will use it.

Just like the streetlights, what choices will you make to make sure the lights stay on before we replace the light completely?

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