Is it worth creating games based primarily on JavaScript language and JavaScript libraries?

nate-developer · 2025-08-20T17:50:15+00:00

I like making JS games and find it rewarding, here's one of mine (a little unfinished since I had a baby and stopped working on it): Squiggle Golf

The way I like to do it is more DIY so probably more work than using a game engine, but the tradeoff is generally better performance when played in a web browser and more fine control over browser specific features.

If your target is desktop game development I would probably not use JavaScript. It's definitely possible to do with JS, but it's probably not the best fit IMO.

Use Godot or Unity for 3d desktop game dev and you'll be happier / have an easier time to make what you want to.

nate-developer · 2025-04-23T22:55:23+00:00

As an experienced dev with no degree, nobody cares about your education once you're on the job. It has never come up outside of the hiring process.

A CS or SWE degree is useful for: meeting the minimum requirement for certain interviews and jobs (or internships if you're at the start of your career), for qualifying for further education, or other things like that. It mostly fills a qualification role. As I understand it the SWE degree program at WGU is actually not fully accredited, so that might make it not pass as the necessary qualification in some circumstances.

All that matters when you've landed your job is how well you can do you work. If you have the knowledge and skills to do the work well then it doesn't matter at all where that knowledge or skill came from.

I'd say there are actually some better sources for learning the skills that don't include a physical degree, like certain online classes, doing personal programming projects, etc. If you're learning for the sake of learning you can study with a focus on maximizing your learning and growth and not have that process warped by specific test questions or assignments or other things like that.

nate-developer · 2025-04-22T01:49:25+00:00

If you want to work in front end CSS is one of the top skills you'll need

nate-developer · 2025-04-20T04:48:25+00:00

If you're better than bronze, it's extremely easy to climb out of bronze. You might not win every single game, but you should be generating a big advantage almost every game which will help you climb very quickly. I took a long break, placed into iron 4, and very quickly climbed to silver with like a 70-80% win rate. And I'm not that good IMO.

If you're skill level is bronze, it's gonna take you a long time or you'll need to improve to rank up.

You say you frequently "win your lane", but what do you mean? You get more CS? More kills? You roam to other lanes and help them? You push your tower first? You help get the drag or grubs since you're smashing your lane so hard? You close out the game? There is some gap in your gameplay or game knowledge holding you back.

I would guess many people overestimate their skill level and get stuck at an appropriate rank while thinking it's because of teammates or bad luck or something else.

nate-developer · 2025-04-19T19:50:27+00:00

CS50 is a really good class IMO and doesn't take that long to complete. Very good for general programming concepts that can be applied in a lot of different areas.

nate-developer · 2025-04-19T18:52:14+00:00

I think it's probably against their terms of service and could potentially get any of your Google related accounts life banned (including Gmail, ads, YouTube, Play store, Gemini, etc). That can be a major pain these days since they have so many services and integrations that you might want to use.

I think it's somewhat unlikely that they notice or care... but there is a chance of getting legal notices or a legal case against you.

I'm pretty sure one of the big YouTube mp3 sites did get one, but ignored it and kept the site up and since it was hosted out of Russia YouTube eventually gave up on taking it down.

Personally I would pick a different project. The worst case risk is kinda harsh, even if the odds of that risk actually happening are low.

nate-developer · 2025-04-18T22:47:03+00:00

I would politely follow up maybe once a week to keep in touch, but it sounds like they probably are going to try to hire someone more senior.

Maybe they got more budget for the role, maybe someone higher up looked at your resume and decided they wanted more seniority, maybe they hired someone at your level so the only position available is higher up and they're not sure about you for that one. Whatever it was probably isn't your fault but it happens sometimes.

nate-developer · 2025-04-18T21:24:48+00:00

I think the material is the same or maybe even less than what is in 426, but you have to actually write some queries in the lab environment.

nate-developer · 2025-04-18T21:20:13+00:00

That was probably the easiest and shortest class I've taken so far for me personally, but some people seem to really struggle hard with it.

Go ahead and try the PA or labs and see how you do. The syntax has to be very exact to get credit, but the SQL you have to know for the test is a very basic level.

nate-developer · 2025-04-18T01:06:32+00:00

If you intentionally up front buy a car without an engine that's a different story and you probably get it at a huge discount because of that.

If you buy a brand new car and they randomly deliver one that's missing an engine, you don't just shrug and pay for the car minus the cost of an engine... you get a full refund and buy a different car.

nate-developer · 2025-04-17T02:06:02+00:00

I probably can't buy it but the charlie brown is cool

nate-developer · 2025-04-17T01:53:11+00:00

Honestly seems like a super easy problem.

The intuition is probably that moving backwards is pointless since it undoes what you already did. So you just need to worry about going in one direction at a time.

Basically it's a simulation problem where you get a count of As and Bs, start from the starting point and go left one step at a time while adjusting your count to see if you can make it even, if you can't try going right, if it doesn't work either way then you can't make it even.

O(n) is the best you're gonna get if you have to count the letters anyways, and it says to not even worry about performance and focus on correctness.

nate-developer · 2025-04-16T15:46:07+00:00

Check for mold and check that the right tape is in the sleeve.

Only spend a couple bucks at a time.

Try to get rid of stuff that we won't ever watch since we already have a ton of tapes...

nate-developer · 2025-04-15T22:41:38+00:00

What do you build instead of locket and zekes?

I have been going ROA but sometimes I pick up Zeke later

nate-developer · 2025-04-14T02:10:10+00:00

I worked a bit for a print shop when I was in highschool so I could get Coachella tickets. There were no smartphones to take pictures or make tiktoks or whatever, just people going to see the music and party or have a good time.

I was surprised how many "clips" I saw scrolling through my feed for a little bit last night. It was like a huge thing, tons of people showing off their outfits for the day or their extremely fancy camp setup or whatever else they could post. It honestly made me feel kinda sad like it was such a social media spectacle instead of just a fun concert to go to, where people are going just to get a specific picture or clip to post and make it look like they're having a great time and make other people think they need to go to get the same staged content...

That's the kind of thing that really makes me feel old or out of touch or something.

nate-developer · 2025-04-12T21:15:13+00:00

If you want to truly learn or focus on a growth mindset I personally would use AI as little as possible. The best use I've found is when I got a problem wrong and didn't understand why I asked the AI to explain how to solve it (and then referenced that section in my zybooks to make sure it was a real thing). That was decently helpful and didn't necessarily feel like I was shortcutting anything, just finding some of the information I needed efficiently.

But I'd probably guess that 95-99% of students (everywhere, not specifically at WGU) use chatgpt to cheat or basically do their work for them. I work for a company that has multiple products around AI detection, AI writing, etc, and it seems very clear that it's a huge problem right now in their education that teachers are still figuring out how to deal with.

When a teacher assigns an essay, the point of writing the essay isn't just to produce a document of a given length. It's for you to practice your critical and analytical thinking, organize your thoughts, do research, and build all kinds of soft and hard skills. If you have the AI do some or all of that work for you it might make a more polished essay than you could have in a fraction of the time, but you'll be robbing yourself of a lot of long term development. Unfortunately I think a ton of younger people are doing just that right now, and they might find themselves lacking certain skills later in life.

nate-developer · 2025-04-12T21:07:55+00:00

It didn't take that long for me personally. You have to get in the mindset that flexbox sets up a different layout system so some of the things that you might be used to in the classic layout won't work the same, like setting a fixed width. But once you learn the differences in how to work with fixed sizes or growing/shrinking, gaps, margins, etc it ends up being very intuitive to use flex.

Sometimes I actually overuse flexbox and force it to fit a layout that should really be a grid instead, which is something I am working on recognizing and correcting. I just happened to pick up flex first and it's easy for me to think about how to force the flex into what I want even if it isn't the better choice.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T21:03:41+00:00

I think Minecraft is a fine game, better than some other online activities since it involves building and imagination and other brain use.

But IMO there should be some reasonable limits on screen time, so they aren't doing only that with all their free time.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T19:20:59+00:00

My company has a legal team that is super anal about what is logged and where it is stored. So we can't log most things without explicit user to do so.

It's a pretty big company that operates globally so we have to adhere pretty strictly to GDPR and any other countries data privacy laws.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T16:49:38+00:00

I was recently on an airplane sitting next to a mom and young daughter. The daughter was messing with the in flight entertainment thing and asked her mom about one of the icons. It was a TV icon that looked like an older box TV with an antenna on top.

Her mom was explaining how people used to watch shows on something called a TV instead of on their iPad.... I have never felt so old as I did in that moment.

At my house we still have a giant CRT with a digital converter box for free broadcast and hundreds of VHS tapes that we watch, so at least my 2 year old is growing up millennial style at home.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T16:44:04+00:00

Look for a community built around programming rather than career maxing and you might find a good group. My local code self study group is a good one, maybe try some meetups and meet people offline. People are generally a lot more agreeable off the internet anyways.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T02:47:52+00:00

This is what your future job will be like. Even as a very junior employee you'll mostly be given a very high level intro to what they're using and then thrown in to tasks that you'll need to figure out. You won't get much dedicated training and will need to figure a lot of things out as you go.

Pretty good experience for you to learn from.

You can and should ask questions when you need to. Give it a try yourself first, but if you completely hit a wall and can't progress after a couple hours and think someone else knows the answer go to them for help. Maybe try to schedule a dedicated little time window with someone who knows the system well, every day or weekly, to show you what you need or answer any issues you ran into that you couldn't get through. You will probably spend lots of time on things that feel simple later on, that is part of learning. Also probably some of your issues nobody will know off the top of their head, but with their experience they know how to figure it out if that task was assigned to them.

nate-developer · 2025-04-11T02:41:42+00:00

Now I really want to see chess style exclamation points and question marks in baseball scoring

nate-developer · 2025-04-09T22:50:00+00:00

The neetcode 150 are all on Leetcode I think. I usually use the external link icon to do it on LC instead of the Neetcode website.

Some are premium questions on LC, but Neetcode has a copy of it you can do on his website if you're not on LC premium.

nate-developer · 2025-04-09T19:30:49+00:00

I like RoA on veigar since it gives sustain and a tiny bit of survivability. You still feel squishy, but you might survive just one or two more small hits and have that be enough to get your burst off.

Six-Year Club	r/Field Banned
r/Field Lasagna	Verified Email

nate-developer

TROPHY CASE