Funny to see this pop up on HN! Another avid 18xx gamer here and I can highly recommend 1817 as I find it to be the best boardgame of all time!
One of the reasons that 18xx games appeal to engineers is that they are deterministic, most game do not have any random events. What they do feature though is auctions which induce variances in the game. Players are investors looking to make money. Everyone starts out with an equal amount of cash and you invest in companies. The majority shareholder of a company is its president and gets to decide what the company does. Generally, a company will build out its network and then buy equipment (trains) which will service (imaginary) passengers and make money. This money can be re-invested into the company itself or paid-out to the shareholders.
Another reason for the appeal to engineers is the track (network) building aspect. Some games offer quite a variety of network building and some games are more focused on the financial aspect.
Quite a few titles can be played online @ 18xx.games - feel free to message me (wheresvic) if you'd like a teaching game.
I used to do exactly this. However, a couple of years ago when my second child was born I got a family domain and gave them both local email addresses. Then it was just a matter of getting a cheap email host and migrating over from gmail.
I also have a regular ema backup script that backsup the inboxes so the emails are always available offline!
I used migadu for a couple of years and they were great initially but over the past 4-5 months, I've experienced really degraded service when accessing email and setting tags, deleting etc.
Over the last month, I started getting login timeouts and that was the last straw. Recently I noticed that they put up an announcement saying that they are running at very high loads due to the COVID-19 situation. I'm not quite sure how people working from home affects normal email (I guess people are emailing a bit more?) but anyways once the announcement went away, I still kept experiencing issues so I migrated my primary email over to fastmail.
This post came at a very opportune time as I was having some issues recently with my email provider and was looking for alternatives. I own my main email address but I do have a few other domains which I would like to have mailboxes for.
Anyways, after some consideration I went with fastmail for my primary email but I will definitely check out purelymail for my other low-traffic domains!
Of course - this also led me into the rabbit hole of realizing that my email is not backed up anywhere :)
The article is mainly trying to answer the question - how do I begin with a new project? Should I make the UI first or should I make the backend first?
One of my projects where this advice was not followed was one where we decided to build something without having a clear idea of how it was going to be used. In this case we decided to focus on the backend and just had a very rough UI. This project went way overbudget because by the time we managed to get it to the users and got feedback, we had to refactor the entire data model and API due to new requirements.
I suppose one critical take-away from all of this is that proximity to users is a key component of a project's success :)
This is a great list and I would be curious to know if you have done a cost-benefit analysis when compiling this list.
E.g. something like Stripe for payments is probably much more cost effective than paying for some other services like Notion (which I assume you can get away by using google docs or whatever).
One small point not mentioned in the article is that the is hooked on to a wall behind the tv so it is nicely hidden.
A cheaper option would probably have been to get a proper computer (likely secondhand), which would have been more cost effective but probably take up more space :)
Yes, to be honest, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably have gone with the SSD and tried to boot off of it directly.
At the time of writing however, the pi was an experiment and I figured that I would just have an extra drive to store stuff if the pi did not work out. In any case, since it's not being used as a regular computer, the SD card works fine, even when compiling stuff :)
One of the reasons that 18xx games appeal to engineers is that they are deterministic, most game do not have any random events. What they do feature though is auctions which induce variances in the game. Players are investors looking to make money. Everyone starts out with an equal amount of cash and you invest in companies. The majority shareholder of a company is its president and gets to decide what the company does. Generally, a company will build out its network and then buy equipment (trains) which will service (imaginary) passengers and make money. This money can be re-invested into the company itself or paid-out to the shareholders.
Another reason for the appeal to engineers is the track (network) building aspect. Some games offer quite a variety of network building and some games are more focused on the financial aspect.
Quite a few titles can be played online @ 18xx.games - feel free to message me (wheresvic) if you'd like a teaching game.