What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I'm working on an open source project which is still in an early prototype phase that embeds access control policies and more in Git repositories. I'm using https://theupdateframework.io/ for defining policies around who can do what in the repository and validating changes made and pushed to the repo against these policies. I'm curious what others think or have to say about this space!

Edit: I'm working on this as part of my research activities at NYU where I'm a Ph.D. candidate focusing on software supply chain security. TUF is primarily developed and maintained at our lab.

I decided to dip my toes into game development as a little break from my 9-5 job as a frontend web developer. I'm loosely basing it off of a game a friend of mine developed for the TI-83+ back in highschool, called gridrun, where you had to get from point A to point B by touching every blank square on the screen, while avoiding impassable squares.

I quickly learned that game development requires thinking a bit differently than web dev usually requires, even for something as simple as what I've got so far. Right now all you can do is move the player around the board, and there's some very basic collision detection in place to prevent you from going off the board or re-visiting a square. The 'characters' in the game were all just text symbols for a while until I decided to liven things up a bit with emoji. I don't particularly plan on that being the 'final' look for the game, but I'd be lying if I said testing wasn't a lot more fun with a smiley face eating apples and leaving a trail of poop in its wake.

Ultimately though this is a learning experience for me. A chance to have some fun in the evenings writing code for myself, rather than clients. There's a very real likelihood that I'll get bored with it in a day or two, but for now it's a fun way to spend my freetime.

Demo: https://duenas.dev/game/
Source: https://github.com/jd13313/gridrunjs

Working on building up my skills using GitLab and Ruby on Rails so I can apply to a position with them and stand a chance.

Also shared this on reddit at https://www.reddit.com/r/civ/comments/109p81z/new_discord_bot_for_civ_vi_play_by_cloud_games/ and on my blog at https://ari.blumenthal.dev/!/2/-5/roze, but I threw together a bot over the weekend to handle turn tracking for Play by Cloud civ games.

Essentially it takes turn notifications from a Civ VI game and relays it to a discord bot, using some cached data to know whose notifications to send where.

I have a homelab and I'm trying to set up a VPN to it. I did a bunch of prepwork last night. I created an L2TP VPN in my Unifi Controller. I also added started a dynamic DNS service so I can use a domain (really a subdomain) that I own as the address. That required implementing a bash script I found online and setting up a cronjob so that the IP is always up-to-date.

Tonight, I tried connecting to it. And it sorta worked. On my Windows laptop, I could ping and access local network devices while connected to the VPN. But I couldn't browse the Internet and other things like Discord and Steam Chat didn't work. But you know what did work? Playing music in Spotify (though the items on my homescreen didn't load). Also, running having pings to a domain resolve to an IP and actually pinging successfully. Oh and the VPN worked perfectly on my MBP. Makes no sense.

Rather than pulling my hair out more, I think I'll just either try to set up WireGuard or OpenVPN. I know OpenVPN has that free Access Server, but I really wanna try the self-hosted stuff first.