Taylor Monthly - March 2026
| Count | |
|---|---|
| Releases | 0 |
| Commits | 26 |
| Contributors | 1 |
| Pull requests merged | 0 |
| Issues closed | 0 |
At a Glance
Jumpy Alien
I spent some time this month and finished polishing off the Jumpy Alien example!
The final touches ended up being:
- Hitboxes for sky and ground
- Sound effects
- Background music
- Settings menu
- Volume settings
- Logo
Play the Game!
Community Site
Now that I got warden working with Hanami I’ve decided to go back to my Rails implementation of the community site. While I’ve enjoyed Hanami I’m looking to have a high velocity with this so sticking with tooling I know is going to be better. I will absolutely revisit Hanami later as I liked a lot of the decisions they’ve made and found it a great experience.
Going back to an old codebase always means I get to do one of my favourite things, upgrading libraries! I’m not even kidding, I get a lot of pleasure out of bumping gems and doing Rails upgrades. So now it’s running on Rails 8.1.
I decided to take it a step further though and rewrite the entirety of the erb templates I was using into Phlex. I find using Phlex a much nicer experience than writing erb templates.
I’ve rewritten the live updating mechanism. I was tempted to switch away from htmx but decided to stick with it in the end but needed a better architecture. The biggest issue was actually how I figured out what had updated. I was just asking each type of record I cared about if they had been updated. It kind of worked but it didn’t handle the case of things being deleted and it required quite a few different database queries to figure out.
The new architecture now has a model for all the updates in the system that I
care about. When you update a post it creates an Update record that says a
post was updated. When you delete a post it creates an Update record that says
a post was deleted. This has cleaned up that whole code path a lot.
I’ve also finally committed to styling the page and wanted to share a sneak preview, it’s not the most exciting but I think it’s consistent with everything else I’ve been doing and think it’s easy to use.
