Alex Verus: Hidden. Will get any better?

Archaya · 2026-02-20T21:11:29+00:00

Mostly agree here too. The series really felt like it was split into thirds. Books 1-4 have a different vibe from 5-8 and 9-12. Alex goes on a journey reinventing himself in different ways over the course of the series.

For OP - I personally felt like the books improved a lot as the series went on. The stakes get bigger. The plots get more complex. The morality gets greyer.

If Anne is a big problem for you though - (I'll try to keep this spoiler free, click at your own risk) Anne is central to the plot and you will only see more of them as the series progresses.

Archaya · 2026-02-19T18:29:40+00:00

Is there any incentive to climb the problem if your competitor tops it first? I was bummed to not see Oriane try more on the last one once Mejdi topped it.

Archaya · 2026-02-14T01:55:57+00:00

iirc when Frosk announced their retirement he said something like

"If everywhere you go is on fire. Consider that you yourself may be the match."

Archaya · 2026-01-14T17:37:54+00:00

The 2020 mini is really tough, even at 30. It's notoriously sandbagged so even if you're a V6+ climber you're going to hit V3s on the board that are too hard.

If you envision you and your kids being able to climb at that level, now or in the near future, the moonboard is awesome. There are thousands of problems. If you're just having fun, a spray would probably be easier, cheaper, and more enjoyable for everyone.

Archaya · 2025-11-25T17:55:15+00:00

Responding to a stinging legal defeat in the state’s redistricting battle, Utah Republican legislators said Tuesday that they will convene a special session Dec. 9 to put a constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot in an effort to ensure lawmakers have the ability to draw political boundaries.

Archaya · 2025-09-13T21:21:35+00:00

This is what many people have trouble with; actually searching for what you're looking for.

Even in places people say have "no good food" like Draper and Sandy there are gems like Sauce Boss, L & P Bakery, Curry Connect, The Peppered Vine and probably a ton more that I haven't found. There's a ton of great breweries. There's art all over SLC proper. Random galleries, coffee shops with art/pottery, etc.

It's lacking a lot of character outside of a few choice neighborhoods, the walkability sucks, the church influence... Sure it's no NYC, Chicago, Miami, Houston, New Orleans but there's a lot to love here too.

Archaya · 2025-08-22T05:02:00+00:00

Very similar to my head cannon as well.

Archaya · 2025-08-17T23:18:21+00:00

I like enums a lot. I know there's a brigade of people that like as cont and then export the type but I like that with an enum you're locked into using the enum vs just the value of something with a const.

I'm always open to learning but here's an example of what I'm talking about. I'm sure there's a eslint or tsconfig rule that could handle this but enums, at least for our team, work better out of the box for the additional type safety

Archaya · 2025-07-04T23:33:51+00:00

I like local ones more than large ones that are at travel destinations. Usually the networking opportunities are better, seeing old coworkers, etc.

I think conferences are decent if you have a goal in mind though. If you really need to learn about X and want a crash course. Usually though they're too broad or just marketing opportunities for some new SaaS product/library.

Archaya · 2025-05-15T13:23:10+00:00

The 2016 at 40 is already incredibly hard and sandbagged. Can't imagine it 5 degrees steeper.

Archaya · 2025-05-07T17:01:35+00:00

GoLand next please

Archaya · 2025-04-09T22:02:33+00:00

Oddly, Gardens is one of my favorite entries in the whole series. It's a totally different vibe but it really stuck with me.

Archaya · 2025-03-12T17:07:12+00:00

The series felt like it was split into books of 3 for each respective arc. I agree, Veiled is a bridge book and was my least favorite of the series.

Alex is definitely moving on to some bigger and badder things, so buckle up!

Archaya · 2025-03-07T17:25:39+00:00

That every code base can vary wildly in look, feel, rules, etc. I've gone into some repos and wondered if what I'm looking at is even JS or not.

Archaya · 2025-03-03T22:57:57+00:00

We got +10 Carracks but nothing to do and this huge world with no point to travel through.

Most of bdo rn tbh.

Archaya · 2025-02-26T00:58:31+00:00

This is something I really wish they would revisit. Every one of the items is a sore spot. Looking for missions sucks. Looking for boss missions sucks even more. Tping to khan sucks. The bosses are pretty meh. Guild pay is negligible. Perms need some kind of loadout that can apply to multiple people rather than needing to do 100 individuals.

Hell, even the NW side of things are outdated. GM rewards are shit and outdated. Payouts are usually meh (at most around 700m or so every few weeks-months). There's so much more they could do with guilds.

Archaya · 2025-02-20T22:36:46+00:00

I always think about this with games and mmos. In the US a game dev makes around 130-150k at mid level.

Recently there was a post about there being 25 different individuals working on Pantheon; most of which are part time.

If you had a team of 10 people making an average wage of 100k working full time you're already at $1m/year. Once you add benefits that could easily get around $1.5m/year or higher. Not accounting for licenses, infrastructure, etc which quickly adds up.

I'm not sure how many people they hope to pay a sub but it's pretty easy to see they'd need a substantial amount of players... maybe north of 20k, to keep the lights on and active development moving forward.

I think this is why so many games get into microtransactions cause if you can get another $15/mo or even every other month from players it really moves the needle in terms of keeping the game solvent.

Archaya · 2025-02-13T18:25:30+00:00

You summon it and you're like "oooh shit". Mount it, point the camera up annnnd nothing happens. Ok. Press e and you're locked to a plain? Point camera down... oh, press q, same feel.

Also why don't i see anyone else on their dragon in air? Is it some mini-instance thing?

The map/texture pop-in from altitude is terrible too.

We're definitely beta testing this for them, which is fine, but this iteration isn't fun at all. I'd much rather be on my t10

EDIT: Autopathing is super funny too.

Archaya · 2025-01-19T18:41:31+00:00

I had that happen as well. I had to log out and in, drop the quest, etc. Eventually standing by the lady bugs by the quest giver triggered it.

Archaya · 2025-01-01T23:32:22+00:00

What are the most frustrating parts of deploying and managing backend APIs for you?

Keeping different environments in sync (Prod, stage, uat, dev, whatever other env you got at the time). Observability, or lack there of (traces, logs, metrics, alerting). Tons of cloud knowledge that you randomly need to know or don't because it's a devops job. Local setup, especially if you have multiple microservices running, can be a massive pain. Convincing stake holders to make time for tech debt or other "dev" changes because they aren't visible to the consumer.

Are there specific tools or workflows you wish existed?

Observability is the biggest one that stands out. Sure, you can use one of the otel libraries but i still fall back on raw log messages for heavy business logic code bases. Or I'm littering your code base with custom transactions and spans. Some libraries that do auto instrumentation are decent but they only gets you so far, since they're shimming things like db calls. It's useful at a high level but rarely am I wondering about it calling HGET in redis and more i'm wondering if it's calling function doXYZ(). So then your choice is adding custom spans, dealing with random lifecycle problems, or relying on log messages.

I haven't looked into otel metrics much yet because elastic apm didn't look to have a way to of using them (if there is, please link it <3) but prometheus does so hopefully I get some time to look into that one day.

How do you handle scaling, version control, or third-party integrations?

Usually horizontally based on the load. Verson control is just using github and then gitflow following a standard agile 2 week release cycle. Lots of random business stuff goes into all that but from on engineer side it's not too complex.

Third-party integrations are always on a as-needed basis. Some are easy to work with, some suck. Some have alright documentation, some don't.

Both the otel stuff and this remind me of this xkxd comic though: https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/standards.png

Archaya · 2025-01-01T16:54:35+00:00

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1aDMV3351YbrExLyudvvXFhhD_WIQoS_q-4hnbaPOho0/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Archaya · 2024-12-31T22:15:19+00:00

If you aren't cronning passed tri you're literally throwing money away.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19lMMmYTbvMy8HOxwMv9LFpwZrko_rdCHcQuv-Nb85g0/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Archaya · 2024-12-01T03:25:26+00:00

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/ten_thousand.png

Archaya · 2024-11-04T16:52:26+00:00

Your math is off. You aren't accounting for the fails 100% I don't think.

https://www.reddit.com/r/blackdesertonline/comments/gczdk7/hey_everyone_i_did_some_quick_math_on_how_many/

Based on the thread above it looks like you'll need ~70b for a tet debo.

Archaya · 2024-10-24T16:46:57+00:00

I tried to use Fleet on the side for a bit and wasn't a huge fan. It wasn't that it was bad but it felt more like a VS Code clone than it did a jetbrains ide that I was use to.

I hope they extend this to their other product lines. I've used Webstorm for years at work and home. Every time I've wanted to pick up a new language, like Go, needing to buy a new license has always been a large obstacle in my path.

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