To put this into context: I'm still minor, in Europe, and I was hired into SW company as backend developer. I'm making about 2-3 times as much as my friends in fastfoods.

I'm basically making WS that would be unified wrapper for about 15 another WS - instead of crafting request for each of those, you will just call the API and it will do everything for you.

Everything was fine, until I encountered a nightmare: WSDL/SOAP protocol over HTTPS with need to use client certificate.

Full of false hope, I thought: "It'll be easy, I finished communication with another companies in few hours, this will be quick".

I was very wrong. I spent countless hours on this. I tried 3 programming languages and 4 different frameworks, copy-pasting solutions from stack overflow and wondering why does this still throw errors! I copied it from stack overflow! I used windows alongside linux and installed like 10 wsdl/soap clients from 2008 forums.

I created 8 or so SO questions, most about different language/framework, but the same problem.

Worth of mentoining, at the time, I could obtain wsdl and xsd of the WS with usage of two certificates (crt.pem and key.pem) over PHP. I tried to use PHP SoapClient, which accepted just one certificate file. I used .pem certificate that I received and should get the work done.

Then, I started writing the final question. Including PHP that downloaded wsdl and SoapClient that didn't work. Knowing someone will probably want to see certificates, I used cat key.pem cert.pem > certCombined.pem and diff certCombined.pem cert.pem. cert.pem was the certificate I received and should work. I expected no differences. When I saw two pages of differences, I started to suspect the cert I was given is wrong. So I pointed the PHP SoapClient to certCombined - and it started working!

This would have never happened (at least for several more hours) unless I known someone will want to see diff between working and not-working certificates. Thank you, rubber duck debugging! Next time I'll be solving something, I'll write on paper everything I use and know.

What are your stories?

I just finished playing Florence. Honestly, I enjoyed it, but it definitely doesn't act like most games I've played for the past 20+ years. It's a very short one too, you can finish it in 30 minutes. So it actually feels more like an interactive graphic novel.

I like most aspects of it like the animation, the music, and the clever metaphors they incorporate to the simple puzzles (especially the speech bubble puzzle, and the inventory organizing puzzle).

The main issue might be the duration, if it's longer and has more complex story, it might become something like lucasarts adventure games (which I admit is not the point of Florence).

At the very least it's a very interesting experiment on gaming.

What do you guys think about games like Florence?