Dalton Rowe

Addicted to Flow

2026-09-04T00:00:00.000Z

It's safe to say I'm addicted to the flow state. In software dev the core loop provides a steady loop of dopamine, knocking out task after task. I trade agency and direction for a steady stream of opportunities to achieve satisfying focus. Previously those tasks required some specialized knowledge, but in the age of AI that's not necessarily the case anymore, and so the need for my flow states has dried up.

Adjusting to this brave new world has required me to introspect into my desire to feel of use to others. How can I be of use now that most of my knowledge has been commoditized? Should I take this as an opportunity to divest myself of my "addiction" entirely?

Losing a Hobby

Seeing the previous era of flow state coding coming to an end has helped me realize that my weekend hobby of building web apps was more cosplay at building Products. This was not entirely unknown to me before, but it was easy to dismiss when bathed in the warm focus of a coding session. I knew in the back of my mind that the code (for what I build) was just a small — smallest? — part of a true value providing product.

The need for the flow is now gone, but that wasn't my only interest in building. Thankfully, I suppose, as a front end leaning person I also love user experience and product domains.

Moving up the stack

Now in both work and play I've been pushed up the stack. At work I've always pushed for autonomy and for developers to drive product decisions. I think makers have an on the ground perspective where pragmatic decisions that marry systems, business, and experience are uniquely possible.

I'm fortunate that as the need for designing basic logic wanes, I'm in a situation and even encouraged to drive product and experience direction. There's no flow states to be had it seems though. Evaluation is the job: reviewing others' executions of tasks, reviewing feedback from other product drivers, and reviewing the system the agents produce.

From here

I've not forgotten that even higher up (lower down) the stack are the business needs, but am somewhat relieved I have interest in other areas as my previous ones get crowded out. Product engineer has always seemed like a good fit, and I quite enjoy it, but doesn't provide the same instant gratification.

We Deserve Peer to Peer Devices

2026-08-16T00:00:00.000Z

I'm trying to build a hardware device that isn't connected to the internet, but still exposes a configuration UI without the need for an external app.

It's an obvious capability that can exist but doesn't, because the market prefers a more exploitable interface. The apps used to connect to our hardware have essentially unlimited permission to track our interactions, send data home, or, most annoyingly, stop working altogether.

communicate point to point with other devices
using standard web technologies
opt in to external network access
with no app stores or other middle men

Here's the user experience I'm imagining:

User taps an NFC point or scans a QR code.
OS prompts the user: "Connect to some_device?"
Default browser appears and loads the UI directly from some_device.
If the UI code attempts an outside connection, prompt: "Allow some_device would like to access the internet."

The most common pattern I see is devices exposing a Wi-Fi access point that I can then connect to and configure via a captive portal. This technically works, but feels hacky.

This is a space I want to learn more about and experiment in. I think peer-to-peer device communication keeps services alive longer, and is critical to ownership and long-term reliability for digital devices.

Thoughts on bands

2025-07-27T00:00:00.000Z

Bands are cool, do them.

A friend asked for some feedback on music recently, and it got me thinking. So here’s my thoughts around playing in bands in my early twenties from a mediocre, totally unqualified rando.

Some of it is things that worked for us, some are things I wished we’d leaned into.

Have a plan for the audience

Imagine, as visually as you can, how you want the audience to interact with your music, and then ruthlessly optimize for that in your writing process.

Do you want people to stare into their drinks, dance, mosh, laugh, be impressed? Almost anything is valid except waiting and politely clapping.

Determine what kind of band you are

Reductively there are two types of bands, entertainment bands and art bands. Great bands find a way to be both.

If your goal is to provide an entertaining live or listening experience, build consensus on that as a group and throw any shame aside. Optimize your music, gear and stage presence to that goal.

If you want to focus on your own self expression or the self expression with a group, that's awesome. I really connect with that endeavor. In that case, focus on yourselves, your skills, your craft and try to ignore the outside. Of course you can still have fun with the live performance, but know that maybe you're not gonna exist in the same spaces that some of the more entertainment focused artists will.

Don't over index on social connections

Networking is very important and it creates a lot of opportunities for your band, people with best friend bands, sort of things, but don't let your status in some small community become too large in your mind.

Songwriting is the skill that matters

I personally wanted to believe in some of the egalitarian Queen-inspired vision of a band where every single member is an equal contributor, and we all share credit. But in reality, 75% of the song is the vocals and lyrics; the music is there to support it.

Similarly, if you have someone in your band that creates the lyrics or is the primary songwriter, support them. Unless you can create entire musical ideas including the lyrics on your own, then you're gonna play a support role, and that's fine!

I let my ego hold back the speed at which we could've created, but it's a complicated issue because that puts a lot of weight on the primary creative forces to be decisive and fast and all those other things.

Have fun

Pursuing creative expression with a team of like-minded individuals is maybe the most fun that you could have, so just enjoy it while you got it.

Quality comes from quantity

Create create create, don't ever sit and pick over one idea until it's "perfect". Finish the idea and move onto the next one. I believe that you get better by finishing many many times instead of polishing.

Do it yourself

Have technical skills so that you can record your own band and express your ideas in a consumable fashion. The quality probably won't be what a professional or dedicated engineering producer can do, but it's very satisfying both for you as a band to work together and record music regularly and it allows you to move onto the next idea.

Save your files

Back up the things you create and keep track of them. It is so much fun to look back at the things you've created with your friends and reminisce, but you would be surprised how many bands create music, release it, streaming platforms change, whatever, and that music gets lost. Save it somewhere and you'll enjoy it for a long time.

Anyways, bands are awesome, keep doing them.

Top 25 Games of the 21st Century

2025-07-13T00:00:00.000Z

Giant Bomb is independent for the first time, which is awesome since I used to watch it a lot and appreciate independent websites.

Anyways I pulled my head out from making a live editor for this site and post, and instead just wrote the thing. This list is loosely ranked, and mostly about the experiences I've had with my friends.

🌌 Phantasy Star Online Played alone oddly enough, this aesthetic lives deep in my heart.
🔌 Halo: Combat Evolved LAN parties, ambigious and mysterious geometry, PC mods. Honorable to Infinite for time with friends while abroad.
🗺️ Morrowind Beautiful world, walking out of Balmora in the morning fog to that wonderous soundtrack. Deep and wide, had no clue what I was doing.
🦋 Final Fantasy Tactics Advance Isometric, squad building, ability configuration. Lovely art in a portable format.
🐰 Final Fantasy XII Auto battling, configuration, more Ivalice. Speaks to my programming brain, 4x speed up a must.
🤺 Nidhogg Rivalries abound, great times playing this in upstairs on High St (I think?)
🌎 Super Mario Odyssey I didn't beat this one but my wife suuure did. Super fun seeing her go deep on. Great controls, music, and world.
🏔️ Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild Huge moonshot that revolutionized the series, and some ways the industry. Beautiful piano, character progression, with calls back to 30 years of lore.
🚔 Need for Speed: Most Wanted Highschool PC era, comparing and discussing with Adam. Great controls, and city (if a bit beige).
🏗️ Minecraft Made for all Lego kids, simple, concise, endless. From an Alpha account, a break, to RTX, and then Bobcatville.
🏖️ Super Mario Sunshine Used to be derided, but I spent many hours just exploring. Vacation in a game with lovely music.
🦍 Overwatch Hours and hours with YB, including tournament hosting and streaming graphics. Rise and fall of OWL.
🏎️ Mario Kart DS Playing with friends at GRC, and in AP Music Theory. Crisp, sharp graphics and controls. Game sharing without a cart.
🪄 Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker Another that was looked down upon at the time but I always loved. Spent many many hours sailing around the world.
🚃 Half Life 2 I had serious heart activity being trapped in the hallways after running through the rooftops. Another love of early PC gaming, Steam took foreeeever to download on 56k.
🧑‍🚀 Elite: Dangerous Evan called the shot on this one. Eventually got hooked, got some HOTAS, and my Dolphin. Built my home with the Astrobiology Research Cooperative, which turned out to be ran by furries.
🏟️ Super Smash Brothers: Brawl Getting utterly smacked into the ground by Jared and Stephen. Formative "adult" years at Park Street.
🧑‍🌾 Stardew Valley The dream game successor to Harvest Moon. Indie dev, everything you'd want. Some friends that don't really play games loved it.
🏜️ Journey Dazzling art direction with a haughty multiplayer concept. Mantha made me a beautiful scarf from my first playthrough's player icon.
🪐 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic One of my first Bioware, branching dialogue games. Loved building my character, turning evil at the very end and the DnD roots.
💣 Counter-Strike: Source Playing de_dust2 over and over listening to Vitalic. Eventually branching into the offical maps, then surf, gun game, and custom servers.
🚁 Battlefield 2 Pub stomping with Adam in the Apache on FuShe pass. Grenade fights in Kardand. Miss the game dearly, tragic it's not playable now. Also Project Reality bullet cracks.
🎲 Neverwinter Nights Some of my first exposure to DnD ideas. I remember having dreams of being a ranger after playing. I was terrible, but I loved it.
🐥 Sonic Adventure 2 Loved the music, still listen to it. Gameplay is rough at times, but spent many hours growing Chao in the garden.
🎥 Until Dawn Had a blast playing with my wife. Fun, quick, focused.

Bonus: Original Xbox

A friend wanted to make an (ordered list) for a specific console, so here's the OG Xbox. While there are some multiplatform games, I prioritized games I actually played on the big boy.

💍 Halo
💣 Halo 2
⚔️ Fable
🐉 Jade Empire
⏰ Timesplitters 2
🏂 SSX Tricky
🤠 Red Dead Revolver
🛬 Mercenaries
🥎 Fusion Frenzy
🗺️ Soul Caliber 2
🔨 Red Faction 2
🌟 Advent Rising
🥷 Ninja Gaiden
🔫 Pariah
🐺 Bloody Roar: Primal Fury

Rails View Components + Form Builders

2025-05-02T00:00:00.000Z

I've been building a new Rails 8 application recently. I'm all in on View Components, and have enjoyed building it out as pure and Rails-y as possible.

I came across a (documented) gotcha around using Rails Form Builders in View Components. Here's how I got the setup I want.

Setting default Form Builder in Rails View Components


class ApplicationComponent < ViewComponent::Base 
  alias_method :original_form_with, :form_with 
  
  def form_with(**args, &block)
    original_form_with(**args, builder: MyFormBuilder, &block) 
  end 
end

The above renames the form_with method to original_form_with to get it out of our way. It then inserts an extra builder: MyFormBuilder, so you never have to think about it again.

Using View Components in Form Builders

For posterity, here's the rest of my Rails View Component Form set up:


class MyFormBuilder < ActionView::Helpers::FormBuilder
  def my_submit(**args, &block)
    defaults = {
      type: :submit
    }

    view_context.render MyButtonComponent.new(**defaults.merge(args))
  end

  private

  def view_context
    @view_context ||= ApplicationController.new.view_context
  end
end

Allowing you to then use:


form_with ... do |form|
  form.my_submit
end

Here we create a new Form Builder at config/initializers/my_form_builder.rb inheriting from the default. I've added a private method to get a controller ViewContext so we can render view components with no extra faffing about.


class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  default_form_builder MyFormBuilder

  ...
end

Lastly we set the default builder using the handy Rails default_form_builder, these folks thought of everything.

Extra Context + Sources

This was an intentional decision from the View Components team to prevent unexpected changes to rendering behavior.

Thanks to Lucas Mendelowski for the helpful article on how to easily slot VCs into Form Builders, shown above.

Container Tabs

2025-03-25T00:00:00.000Z

Tunnel effect with SVG

scad-js-esm

2025-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

OpenSCAD via JS ES Modules

Canvas Crusher

2025-02-01T00:00:00.000Z

Canvas Dither Toy

LTTP Layers

2025-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

3D CSS + WebAudio experiment

HalloWLED: Spooky Sound Effects Controller

2024-10-31T00:00:00.000Z

At the beginning of our first year in Germany, we were informed Halloween was a big deal on the siedlung.

Being fools for Halloween ourselves we bust out the decorations, and I whipped up a little script to play sound effects with synchronized lighting.

A couple people even took pictures!

Some of my favorite scenes:

⚡️ Lightning Flashes with Rolling Thunder
🍯 Boiling Cauldron with Laughing Witch
🎪 Creepy Circus
🚨 Eerie Red Glow with Synths
🎃 And More!

WLED

WLED is an LED controller for ESP32/ESP8266. It has tons of built in effects and a good amount of customization. It provides a web UI for editing but also includes a JSON API!

Prebuilt WLED ESP32 controller

These prebuilt ESP32 boards with WLED already flashed made setup a breeze. Only needed to update OTA, setup the attached light strips, connect to the network!

HalloWLED can run from a laptop or a Pi.

Networking

HalloWLED is a great starting point if you want to script some WLED instances via their API.

It can run on a network, where a hostname for a node is required. It will then grab all other node IPs via the WLED API.

I found updating each node directly to be more reliable then using WLED's built in sync, where occasionally a strip would not recieve the new effect.

HalloWLED running in direct AP mode for Trunk or Treat

Additionally it can also run in direct AP mode, where it connects the WLED instance's wireless access point. For Trunk or Treat decorations, I ran a WLED + 120 LED strip off a pocket battery pack, and could have stayed lit for probably ~6 hours.

Happy Halloween!

Its a basic project, but I did take some care and iterations to make it a good experience for viewers.

It doesn't repeat effects back to back to ensure variety, and it swaps to a background scene in between effects in order to prevent effect lighting for outlasting its welcome.

My wife being out of this world 👽

I'm glad my little weekend project went off without a hitch, and made some young folks Halloween even more fun!

View the "HalloWLED" repo on Github here

QA Obstacle Course

2024-07-01T00:00:00.000Z

Browser automation tests

CaptureTag: A Raspberry Pi NFC Game

2024-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

Imagine playing king of the hill as a kid, but when you capture the hill the whole landscape around you is illuminated with light and color. That's the big vision for this small game prototype.

I wanted to make a game, that takes place in the real world involving no phones or other devices.

Built with Raspberry Pi’s, NFC readers, LED strips, and Supabase. The goal of the game is to capture and hold and many capture points as you can, stealing them back from other players, and sneaking off the gain control for your team.

The Game
The Tech
Play Test
Takeaways & Next Steps

The Game

“Multi Hill King of the Hill” is the best one phrase explainer I’ve found so far. The goal is to capture areas for your team by swiping your NFC card at the control point.

A stealthy player walks away from a recently captured point.

Players compete for control of each zone, both to gain their team capture time as well as capture points for themselves.

An scoreboard then displays captured areas as well as a leaderboard.

Scoreboard and floor plan displayed on a TV

The Tech

Each node / "hill" consists of:

Raspberry Pi 3B+
WS2182 Light Strip
RC522 NFC Reader / Writer

I enjoy working within Raspberry Pi well-trodden ecosystem. They are often overkill for projects, but its great to continue working in a familiar Linux environment.

NFC cards and a Raspberry Pi node being setup for play.

The capture point is written in NodeJS, with the help of some awesome packages, namely node-rpi-ws281x-native and mfrc522-rpi.

Each card has a hex-encoded string written to it that decodes to something like `B-taco`. The first letter being the team, and second being the player's code name.

When a scan happens the Pi debounces the scan event (as they can happen in quick succession) and then shoots up the data to a simple Supabase project with a few endpoints. A lot of fun insights can be derived from the data, see the play test below for what I pulled out.

Each scan event is stored as an event queue so that game node are mostly stateless and the data can be replayed and parsed later.

Rough and simple admin dashboard for managing games and nodes.

Game sessions, node assignment, and project endpoints can be managed via a super rough dashboard I slapped together. I enjoyed working framework free and keeping it as barebones as possible.

The scoreboard page uses Supabase Realtime to provide instant updates to the capture state of each node, as well as keep the leaderboard up to date.

Play Test

I was planning to have a get-together with my friends in an Airbnb, and I realized that would be perfect opportunity to try out the game!

Teaching

I didn’t get a representative experience of introducing the game to players as all involved were close friends and more or less taught each other. However I did learn a few things:

🖼️ Show Don't Tell All the words in the world didn’t compare to swiping a card and seeing the color on the point change. The actual demo following by a suggestion of how to be competitive got people interesting and playing right away.
🙋 Personally Relevant Goals First Intially, I started introducing the team goals like holding the point for your team and total capture time. But quickly I realized players cared more about their personal actions and contributions, so I started introducing that first. I’m still personally interested in the team aspect so I’ll likely spend time juicing the experience of contributing to one’s team with team leaderboards and other stats.

Player Feedback

I got tons of great feedback as I discussed with players, each had their different play styles and focused on different parts of the game.

🏆 Desire for Leaderboard Universally, all players wanted to see who had the most scans. I incorrectly assumed team play was more interesting but quickly pivoted.
🔒 Lockout Time “Steals” happened frequently. Players capture a point, and then another competitive player would sneak up right behind them and recapture the point. Several players brought up that a lockout time would feel better, so their progress wouldn’t immediately be wiped away. I like this idea, but will likely implement it with a light touch as not to discourage the highly engaged stealing players.
📝 Genuine Product Direction from Players Gathering feedback directly from engaged players was a rush. Being surrounded with players having discussions and combined with the agency to make any changes I felt necessary was a beautiful taste of true user focused design.

Parsing Data

A few days after the game was complete I parsed out all the scan events to determine the winner, as well as some interesting stats!

Team based stats were less interesting in this play test, but I think with the right visibility team based play could be made really fun for players.

Next Steps

As I have time I want to polish the game, to make it as beautiful a process as possible, more so than expanding with new features. Here are a few things that I've been ruminating on:

Improvements

📡 Local server support There's not really a need to a central online server, I could instead use a command node and keep the game local to the network.
🔧 Use GUIDs + registration flow to Setup Cards Currently each card must be burnt with a team code and player name, just use the built in GUIDs instead and register each card to a user name.
🔒 Add Lock Out time with Visual Effects As mentioned, prevent instant steals from watchful players. There's opportunity for a high affordance design, gradually fading into the new colors.
💡 Control External Lights via API To control a larger universe of lights, have a local command node find and set lighting for node zones.
🤏 Shrink nodes from Pi to ESP32 Raspberry Pi is super duper overkill for these little scanner nodes.
🌗 Prevent Partial Scans Sometime I received partial scans from the NFC cards. I'm not sure why this happens but there ways to check for and prevent this.

Takeaways

🛝 Rediscovering Playground Mentalities The childlike playground mentality is essential when thinking about and explaining games. It took a minute to get back into but I loved living in that space during the play test. Initially the game was called "Lumi" but "CaptureTag" (as suggested by my friend Tim) explains itself and communicate the correct level of anti-serious playfulness.
🏅 Competing for Most Scans is Fun Players talked the most about on upping each other, and loved seeing their numbers go up!
🪪 Players Lose Cards Be able to ready to make backups 🙂
📺 Prevent Burn In When displaying the leaderboard on a TV, have tools to prevent burn-in, such as a slight wiggle and dark mode.

Thanks!

Creating an physical game with the tools of my incredibly virtual trade was very gratifying.

For those curious to see the code, it's pretty simple and might serve as an example for some basic LED + NFC integration in Node.

View the "Lumi" repo on Github here

My side project mindset in the past has been very business focussed, and I'm excited to build more projects around providing fun and pleasure than extracting money.

simpleretro

2022-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

Another in a series of side projects scratching my own itches. Every sprint our Product Manager would complain about not being able to find a simple retro tool that allows for ranking by number of votes.

Retro runner's view with all session controls.

I was enjoying working with Firebase at the time, so I whipped up a quick tool with only the features we needed:

😎 Masking user's feedback
📡 Realtime editing
🗳️ Vote limiting
📚 Sort by votes / recency
🖇️ Combining similar feedback

We got some nice use out of this guy. I designed some of the systems around the good faith of participants, some of the logic around card masking and maximum votes lives in the frontend. None of the developers involved got overly curious at what they might be able to affect but it's only a matter of time.

A retro participant's view

Firebase is great for throwing together apps really quickly. This project explored use of Firebase's Firestore emulation for a test suite which is quite ergonomic, as well as some handrolled "migrations" which were less so 🙂.

Soundsleeper

2022-06-01T00:00:00.000Z

I needed a white noise app to help a family member sleep, but all the existing ones had upsells. This mostly worked but Apple doesn't let PWAs play audio via the Web Audio APIs when locked.

Soundsleeper with equalizer expanded.

This project hit the edges of PWA capabilties, so I didn't ever get to use it much personally. But it demonstrates some cool browsers APIs such as:

🔊 Web Audio API
🎚️ Media Sessions API
📱 Progressive Web App / Service Workers
🧸 Zustand State Management Even though I used a destructing anti-pattern O_O

I unknownly re-invented jackyef's project here, which I found later.

Creating seamless looping audio requires using the Web Audio API, as of writing. Using the Audio APIs to play sound instead of standard HTML markup allowed for EQ controls as well.

Soundsleeper Logo

View on "Soundsleeper" repo on Github

It also utilizes the Media Sessions API to allow for audio control via the Mac menu bar, as well on the lock screen for supported devices.

It's up for now at soundsleeper.app, but I'll probably let it expire since I'm not using it at the moment.

Frameshifter

2021-05-22T00:00:00.000Z

Gameplay dashboards for Elite Dangerous

Aestherial - [object Object]

2021-01-23T00:00:00.000Z

Chill music with my friend

InsideOut Christmas Spectacular

2020-12-24T00:00:00.000Z

Like most good TV shows, InsideOut got a Christmas special.

A 24-hour live steam / beautiful mess featuring:

🎸tons of community submitted content
😴sleeping for a few hours
🗽a deep dive into philoshopy at 3AM
❤️a heaping of community love
💸$4000 raised for Toys for Tots!!

Yellowberri 3.0 Website

2020-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

A few things I'm proud of in the Yellowberri 3.0 website.

I didn't know it had fireworks! I told my wife, she was very supportive.

At Yellowberri I worked with WordPress a lot, and was lucky enough to find Advanced Custom Fields early on. We primarily worked on information based (brochure) websites for small to medium sized businesses.

Putting it all together

I learned an immeasurble amount during that time, especially about what kind of websites get updated, and those that don't. That's worth a whole other post. But anyways, I aimed to make a new Yellowberri website that was, in order:

🎉 going to recieve updates
⚡️fast
🌟flashy

What I think is neat

WordPress Backend

WordPress + ACF, in my opinion provides an unequaled backend CMS experience for users whose primary occupation is not updating websites. Many website maintainers are familiar with WordPress in advance even!

Static Compatible

While not currently deployed as such, the 3.0 site can be turned into a static site with a simple wget + find and replace. The site utilizes Formspree for simple contact forms with no additional Javascript.

Prepared for Social Media

Small standalone websites mean nothing without distribution. I've found one the killer app of on-site blog posts is control over Open Graph images and titles for distribution on social channels. The CMS experience is a Pass/Fail test for utilization, so using intuitive tools and defaults is a must.

Solid Lighthouse Scores

On launch scores, were pinned at 100 across the board! I was very happy to have achieved that in a live production site. After install third party scripts the score dropped a few points, but still firmly in the green.

Lottie / Bodymovin Integration

Built from the start to support inline SVG and Bodymovin animations, the 3.0 sites supports updating designs straight from After Effects or Illustrator via the WordPress backend.

Page Animations

While admittedly a bit flashy, I think it's okay for an advertising site. The JS splits a Bodymovin animation by frames and randomizes the entry and exit. Featuring homespun page replacement AJAX to allow for page transitions between server rendered pages.

Best part

It's getting used! It took a long time to get launched but I'm glad it's out for now :)

Tidball's InsideOut

2020-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

The local musician hotspot sits empty during the start of the COVID.

When the Coronavirus pandemic first hit and shutdowns began, no one knew how to react. Our local music venue and bar Tidball's, most known for being the starting point for Grammy award winning Cage the Elephant, decided to find new ways to reach their community.

Oh wait are we on?

Brain Jarvis, David Downing, Nathan Morguelan, Jessi Wurth and myself started hosting a twice weekly two-hour live steam featuring community music contributions, phone calls, and general zanyiness.

Truly a collabrotive mind-meld, ideas were abundant, passions high, some toes were stepped on but every member brought unique and essential aspects to the production. Truly a special moment for all us.

We figured out as we went how to wrangle the chaos of multi-camera live streaming.

The community involvement was truly life changing. Heartfelt messages during calls, a comment section with unmatched enthusiasm and dedication, and even an unforgettable message of love from a new father were all unexpected and greatly appreciated.

And that's to say nothing of the music!

Homegrown Music

The Girl Tones on a live stream in Tidball's during InsideOut.

Every town says their music community is special, but it's obvious the music community in Bowling Green did something special.

Artists from around Bowling Green and beyond wrote, recorded and performed hours of content in their own homes, that we were lucky enough to share on stream. Collabrations between new and old friends produced some genuinely amazing pieces under extraordinary circumstances.

Overall we estimated around 180 hours of streaming in 2020.

80% of that I'd say was community performances and contributions! I can't thank all the artists that contributed enough.

Above and Beyond

John Tidball playing some Boston Beans dressed as White Lion, don't ask.

The community as well as the core crew at Yellowberi put in tons of time and effort on special segments.

Fueled by Dang-Dangs (Jarvis special InsideOut concoction) the streams featured call in segments, on location out on the town shoots, over produced music videos, frantic police light backed rants against Zuckerburg and much more.

Christmas Finale

Like most good TV shows, InsideOut got a Christmas special, more about that here.

Vecteezy

2019-04-01T00:00:00.000Z

Eng. Manager / Sr. Developer

Porchlord - Mouth

2018-11-01T00:00:00.000Z

Art, Guitar, Production - 2016

Literary Accessories

2018-03-01T00:00:00.000Z

My wife had an idea for a phone case, I designed it and she didn't even buy it 😤.

The Shakespeare pattern was the one she wanted.

I ended creating a few more designs, including some manually upscaling before AI upscaling was a thing. A few of these were discoverable on Redbubble, I enjoyed see the orders come in and paying for dinner every couple months.

Gatsby Static Site

I created a quick site for my designs, though it had no effect on sales I'm sure. I was interested in Gatsby, so dug into all its cool features to toss together a mini-site.

Pre-rendered SVGs fading into loaded assets

The Gatsby Image element was new at the time, and allows for compile time operations to be performed on images. Here the images are posterized and saved inline as SVGs. The final image then fades in after its loaded.

This was built when Gatsby hype was at its peak, and was great learning experience. The data layer was overkill for my needs and a bit inflexible for the other projects I tried it with (mainly around optional fields from CMSes).

Anyways, saving this here for the memories, since I no longer wanna renew the domain.

Discord Throwdown

2018-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Yellowberri threw a video game tournament between Discord servers. Eight teams competed complete with custom scoreboard and overlays, commentary and multi camera coverage.

Custom OBS overlays powered by Websockets

The YB Gaming Discord server grew it into an awesome place and eventually resulted in people from all over the US meeting in person!

Some neat things

🎨 Stream overlay scorebard, custom colors, animations
🎥 Animated webm video transitions
☁️ Hosted NodeJS server sending websockets to local OBS Rebuilt a few versions of ^ since for other projects
🎬 Camera switching via local network NDI
🌡️ Discord Hype Meter
🏆 Customizable cards, overlays, counters

bgrad.io

2018-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

Bowling Green is a tertiary city in Kentucky where I went to college and met a beautiful group of people. BG has a grip of talented musicians creating art and performing live.

As I transplant to BG, I got to know some of these people, and heard from them about the previous eras of music in BG, and their musical influences that are no longer active.

Creating the bgrad.io brand was one of my fav parts.

This experience led to me to create an database of local bands and musicians, reach out to them and get their permission to stream their music.

Iteration 1: Youtube Stream

The first version of bgrad.io was a 24/7 Youtube stream. These streams were popular at the time with beats to relax/study to leading the charge.

A music video playing on the Youtube version of bgrad.io

V1 was composed of some node scripts, a web interface, and OBS. I had a poor little Mac mini chugging away in my office for days at a time. Uptime was decent, but occasionally the next song would not play due to bugs in the node scripts.

Debugging bgrad.io scripts.

The Youtube stream had some cool features:

🖼️ Album art display
🏃‍♂️‍➡️ Art and title animation
🎼 Album and artist information
🎥 Music videos support when available
🧑‍🏫 Interesting facts displayed per album and artist

Iteration 2: Azuracast Server

Eventually, I got tired having to host the stream locally in my own home. Occasional connection issues as well as network and power usage was less than ideal. To say nothing of the eventual copyright strikes I would attract on Youtube, despite having explicit permission from the rights holders.

So I looked into rebuilding bgrad.io as a hostable internet radio station. I found Azuracast, a great easy to roll streaming solution. I tossed it on a Digital Ocean droplet and redid the website, and let people know.

Azuracast / Wordpress version of bgrad.io.

The response was much greater this time, and people shared how they enjoyed getting to rediscover artists they hadn't heard in decades.

Hopefully I revive this again in some form or another one day.

Porchlord - It's Alive

2016-11-05T00:00:00.000Z

Art, Guitar, Production - 2016

Porchlord - Or Else

2015-01-02T00:00:00.000Z

Art, Guitar - 2015

Porchlord - The One Where They Fought the Dragon

2014-01-09T00:00:00.000Z

Art, Guitar - 2014

Dalton Rowe

Addicted to Flow

Losing a Hobby

Moving up the stack

From here

We Deserve Peer to Peer Devices

Thoughts on bands

Have a plan for the audience

Determine what kind of band you are

Don't over index on social connections

Songwriting is the skill that matters

Have fun

Quality comes from quantity

Do it yourself

Save your files

Top 25 Games of the 21st Century

Bonus: Original Xbox

Rails View Components + Form Builders

Setting default Form Builder in Rails View Components

Using View Components in Form Builders

Extra Context + Sources

Container Tabs

scad-js-esm

Canvas Crusher

LTTP Layers

HalloWLED: Spooky Sound Effects Controller

WLED

Networking

Happy Halloween!

QA Obstacle Course

CaptureTag: A Raspberry Pi NFC Game

Contents

The Game

The Tech

Play Test

Teaching

Player Feedback

Parsing Data

Next Steps

Improvements

Takeaways

Thanks!

simpleretro

Soundsleeper

Frameshifter

Aestherial - [object Object]

InsideOut Christmas Spectacular

Yellowberri 3.0 Website

Putting it all together

What I think is neat

WordPress Backend

Static Compatible

Prepared for Social Media

Solid Lighthouse Scores

Lottie / Bodymovin Integration

Page Animations

Best part

Tidball's InsideOut

Oh wait are we on?

Homegrown Music

Above and Beyond

Christmas Finale

Vecteezy

Porchlord - Mouth

Literary Accessories

Gatsby Static Site

Discord Throwdown

Some neat things

bgrad.io

Iteration 1: Youtube Stream

Iteration 2: Azuracast Server

Porchlord - It's Alive

Porchlord - Or Else

Porchlord - The One Where They Fought the Dragon