weeknotes 13

roleplaying

We had a really good session last time! It feels like we made some story progress and learned some things about the primary antagonists in the narrative. Plus the players made some hard choices and did some strong negotiating. Looking forward to the next session. Let’s see if I can remember what’s going on by then…

automatic rebasing

Now GitHub have an automatic merge feature, I’ve been thinking about how to automate the whole process from deciding something should be merged to it being merged. I have two needs not currently met:

• forcing a branch to be up to date with the target branch before merging
• automatically merging dependencies that pass tests

I’ve started working on a GitHub action to meet both of these needs. It will look for labels in it’s configured list or intent to merge by pressing the button in GitHub, and do automatic rebases as needed to get things tested and merged serially. However, it turns out that it’s actually really hard to test something meta like this. The tests need to run in a GitHub workflow and interact with a repository on GitHub (for a proper integration test). The approach I’m going for is to have a separate “test” repository that is controlled by the “action” repository. A PR in the action repository will push some code to the test repository, and open PRs and add labels as needed. The repository itself won’t own any code, allowing for changes to the testing process to also be tested without introducing a feature lock on two repositories. I’m not confident that this is actually going to work without being extremely painful, though.

sveltekit

SvelteKit entered public beta this week. A task for next week is to migrate this site over.

tough week

It’s been A Week.

I’ve been on a challenging project that suddenly ramped up this week and a political clash with someone at work was reawoken, which put me into a bit of a spiral in the middle of the week. The project has been a lesson in why we work on collaborative teams when we can, but hopefully it’s now done, or at least my involvement in it is. I feel a bit bad having a week off now while others have to finish it up, though…

mental health in games

I participated in a research panel on Monday run by the Mental Health Foundation, thinking about the interaction between mental health and games. One of the things this research is trying to focus on is how people can use or interact with games in a way that supports their mental health. Most of the existing research is about how Games Are Bad, but it’s more complicated than that. I personally use games as a mood regulator, for example. If I’m very anxious, I find playing a game allows me to escape that anxiety and do whatever processing I need to do, subconsciously.

entertainment

We caught up on Westworld since it’s back on a streaming service and have started watching House again. It’s formulaic, but the right balance of mindless and engaging for decompressing.

I played through Nuts in the bath on the weekend and have started on Bravely Default II (the worst named game ever).