Let's remember the good times.

On February 26, 2008, Imperial Conflict's original, hand-coded forums were hacked.

I bet it was Michael Scofield.

A common but tragic design flaw led to a SQL injection attack in which our devious assailant replaced all 279,871 of our posts with an embedded Rickroll video. To make matters worse, the site owner at the time didn't maintain any backups which meant that we had lost 8 years worth of community interaction across 22,421 players.

"I'm never gonna give you up." was a painful lie.

We'd been compromised before, although not nearly as seriously. If our prior attack was a missed wake up call, this was a bucket of ice water in our face.

We needed help. Imperial Conflict needed to focus on its game code, which had its own issues, rather than worrying about forum software to boot.

PunBB saved our bacon.

Regrettably, I can't vouche for their ability to save every bacon.

PunBB was 5 years old at the time, and offered a cleaner and more lightweight solution to phpBB, amongst others. It was brought to our attention by one of our players, who even ended up being a PunBB developer. For the time, this was pretty exciting.

From Wikipedia:

Until September 2011, Facebook's Developers were using Facebook Developer's Forum for discussions and bug reports, which was powered by PunBB.

We were in good company.

With an unplanned (and unwanted) clean slate, we set up an instance and were off to the races. It felt great; using forum software designed by people intending to design forum software. This was far better than our home-cooked forums ever were.

We went a strong 9 years running PunBB, committing so far as to customize it to hook into our game directly in various non-supported ways, which was admittedly risky.

On February 25, 2013, 5 years after our initial migration, we did our first major forum upgrade. That's an embarrassingly long time between upgrades but hey, better late than never, right?

That reference is far more specific than is reasonable.

Anyway, despite having to wrangle some of our custom game-integration hacks, the process was pretty smooth. Not bad considering we'd missed several upgrades in between. Kudos to their upgrade tools!

Unbeknownst to us at the time, just 20 days earlier, a new platform was released that was being driven by one of Stack Overflow's co-founders, Jeff Atwood.

The mobile challenge

Despite the smooth upgrade process, PunBB was starting to show its age.

Now, old software doesn't necessarily indicate "bad" software, but sometimes projects just lose their momentum. It's a sad truth that I've experienced myself repeatedly both in my professional career and as an independent developer.

With PunBB in particular, our players were feeling underwhelmed by the mobile experience. Having dug around in the PunBB core myself, I had a bias for the software and a tendency to defend against these criticisms but in the end our players were expressing an important truth: user expectations evolve and software had better keep up.

PunBB's mobile interface wasn't horrid. It, in accordance with their general aesthetic, was and still is very simple. It's part of what attracted us to them in the first place.

By 2013 however, responsive design was reaching new significance across the web. Mashable even proclaimed 2013 to be the Year of Responsive Web Design. It wasn't enough to just function with an adaptive layout, you had to look good while you did it.

That was PunBB's design shortcoming; it didn't look bad on mobile but it didn't look particularly good either.

API shortcomings

By 2013, the API world had also matured enough that APIs were becoming a prominent if not expected feature for many websites, services, and web software packages.

According to Wikipedia (originally ProgrammableWeb):

ProgrammableWeb tracks 9000 Web APIs that were available in 2013, up from 105 in 2005.

Not coincidentally, Discourse committed a Ruby API consumer in July of the same year, 5 months after Discourse's initial release. By contrast PunBB never released an official API, although its primary fork FluxBB seemed to have expressed interest in 2011, 8 years after PunBB's own initial release.

The timing is significant there, and this is where the comparison starts to become clear to me. When PunBB launched in 2003, APIs existed but had not yet attained the ubiquitous, buzzwordy, near-standard expectation to just be there. In 2013 Discourse was born into a world where APIs were nearly everywhere.

This is why I can't fault PunBB too much; Discourse launched a decade after it did, of course it's going to be a more modern platform.

It's time to move on.

Imperial Conflict is pretty damned old. It started in 2000 and hasn't aged particularly well. When I took over in 2016 I vowed to modernize the game and a big part of that is bringing our communication platforms up to snuff.

We ditched IRC for Discord last year, which was bittersweet but proved to be successful. We've been hovering at over 100 members for awhile now and although it isn't particularly impressive, it's a step up from the 7 or so we had idling in IRC when we made the switch.

With a similar bittersweetness we now move on from PunBB. A newer, prettier, and more functional platform is calling us, and our community's (re)growth and survival depends on us matching user expectations.

Discourse, you seductive devil

If you hadn't noticed already, I'm a fan of what Discourse is doing. As mentioned when I relaunched foohonpie.com, I'm using it here and was test driving it for Imperial Conflict. That was 2 days ago. It was that fast that I decided to pull the trigger. Similar to my experience with Ghost, it ended up being something outside of the product offering itself that pushed me over. That "something", to be blunt, was one of its founders' personal blog.

I've been reading Coding Horror casually for years. I say casually because it was only recently that I actually paid closer attention and realized that Jeff Atwood co-founded Stack Overflow.

If you don't know what Stack Overflow is, let me describe it in one word:

"Hmmmm..."

You know that feeling? When you realize that you're pondering something? That's an integral part of my experience as a web developer and more times than I can count it has lead me googling about some technical matter only to find a Stack Overflow question page that describes my exact situation. More often than not there is also a satisfactory explanation or proposed solution.

It's so helpful it almost feels like cheating.

Anyway, this post isn't about Stack Overflow. The point is, associations are powerful, as is personal branding. Buzzword or not, Jeff Atwood has a personal brand; a reputation. He's entertained droves of us nerds with his blog for years, he and his co-founders launched and built a resource that we devs (and others) use constantly, and now I find out that he also co-founded and launched the primary contender for forum software that I'm considering? What is this guy, the Childish Gambino of web communication?

Because the Internet needs improved communication tools. Hayohhh!

Discourse is compelling enough on its own, but just as with Ghost, the long term vision matters. I'm willing to bet on this option because there is a larger acknowledged goal, if not responsibility, to improve how we all communicate online. I can support that.

Nothing lasts forever

9 years ago when Imperial Conflict integrated PunBB into its ecosystem, we (perhaps naively) didn't expect to eventually jump ship. Having the wisdom and experience now to know better, it would be foolish to think that anything is a permanent solution. That including Discourse.

One day there might be another new hat that we switch to. If/when that days comes I'll be thankful for Discourse's data export tool, just as I've been thankful for PunBB's own upgrade tools and its community's data migration tools.

Speaking of gratitude, I really do want to say thank you to PunBB and team for the 9 years of service. As Imperial Conflict continues to move forward I'll still look back fondly on how you made our lives easier and saved us from ourselves.

Is it normal to become emotionally attached to software? No? I'm asking for a friend.

I no longer eat my own dog food.

When I decided to relaunch foohonpie.com I had an obvious question that needed answering: what is going to power the website?

When I was younger this was easy: I was going to power the website, by coding everything from scratch and learning valuable lessons about web development in the process! I would use my own web software!

According to Wikipedia (via nytimes.com):

Eating your own dog food, also called dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to test and promote the product.

What better way to prove my mettle than to write the software I needed to use? The foohonpie.com blogging framework would power foohonpie.com where I would write about, amongst other things, the foohonpie.com blogging framework. How deliciously self-reflexive. Test 2.

In an alternate timeline, I would then write a blog about writing about blogs.

Things went according to plan. I learned a lot about The Catalyst Web Framework and continued to hone my skills as a Perl developer. When it was time for me to make my first big career leap, I discussed code samples from foohonpie.com's previous incarnation during my job interview. I landed the job. I knew my shit because I did it all myself.

In retrospect, however, I think this was misguided.

I have been embarrassingly selfish.

Here's my GitHub history for 2012, the year I landed the aforementioned job. Notice anything interesting?

No? That's exactly right. There's not anything interesting there because there's not anything there. Despite my aspirations to eventually contribute something to CPAN, I perpetually delayed ever giving back to the open source community (Perl or otherwise), which I still feel pretty guilty about.

How much benefit have I derived from other peoples' work without contributing any time or effort of my own? How many times have I claimed to have built something "from scratch" while using open source software or libraries within my own code? What a hack!

In retrospect, it was a misplaced sense of pride that kept me so isolated. After all, I'd had a fairly successful career as a web developer despite being a college dropout. In my mind, using something like WordPress was for less creative developers.

I still don't use or recommend WordPress for blogging, but these days it's for different reasons (sorry guys!). That's not a shot against them; it's just a matter of product vision and a post for another time.

"Scratch" doesn't exist.

I don't care so much anymore about wanting to build everything I use. It's an impossible goal anyway; even if I published a blog on my own framework, I'd still have written the code using a text editor written by other people, using a language created by other people, running on an operating system designed by other people, utilizing web server software written by other people.

Unless I'm writing machine code, I'm not really doing anything truly from scratch. And even if I was, the hardware running said code would be still had been created by others. You get the idea.

Everything I do is built upon the work from others. This is true for all of us. So if writing is the end goal, why not just focus on writing and let smarter people do the heavy lifting?

Yes, I develop for the web but unless I'm aiming to enter the blogging space (I'm not) then developing proprietary blogging software on my own time is wasting energy that could instead be applied to creating the blog's actual content and supporting its readership.

That is one of the more practical reasons I chose to not to build foohonpie.com from the ground up this time. I would rather support people who do it better than I ever possibly could on my own.

Enter Ghost.

This is not a paid or requested endorsement of any kind. I'm just recounting my positive experience as a blogger re-entering the space. Admittedly, I'm still in the honeymoon phase, but I am optimistic by what I am seeing so far.

After considering other options, namely Medium and Wordpress, I decided that Ghost's product offering suited my needs better than either. A detailed product comparison will be another post for another day, but in the end what sealed the deal was actually their actions and vision as a company.

From their website:

Ghost was founded in April 2013, after a very successful Kickstarter campaign to create a new platform focused solely on professional publishing. Our mission is to create the best open source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world, and have a real impact on the future of online media.

also:

We set Ghost up as non-profit foundation so that it would always be true to its users, rather than shareholders or investors. Our legal constitution ensures that the company can never be bought or sold, and one hundred percent of our revenue is reinvested into the product and the community.

and my personal favorite:

All of our company metrics are public

There's (much) more to it than that and I recommend giving it a read, especially if you have an interest in new media. The point though, for me, was that I found myself wanting to be part of the Ghost ecosystem in a way that I'd not experienced with Wordpress or Medium.

While I'm not just yet available to contribute code (I really want to focus on writing for awhile), I am able and willing to contribute via subscribing to their Ghost(Pro) plan, which takes this whole DDIY (Don't Do It Yourself) concept a step further and abstracts the hosting/sysadmin work into their hands as well.

Of course I could do all of this myself, but why would I? So I can say that I did? So that I could have full control? Well, full control means fully responsible and quite frankly I've got better things to do than maintaining my own blogging software and wearing an ill-fitting sysadmin hat when something inevitably breaks.

I'm here to write.

Five years in the making.

The last time I published something online was in 2012. It was a big year for me; I quit my first job in the tech industry, started my life as a software engineer working from home, and moved away from my friends and family.

And that was just 2012. In the five years since then I've also travelled a bit, co-founded and left a startup, developed for and acquired an MMORPG, and lots of other stuff too. Surely, I would have had enough to write about?

Anyway, I'm writing again now. Lucky you!

We used to be a thing!

The original foohonpie.com website launched in 2003 and quickly built a small, but friendly community around itself.

A "small-butt friendly" community.

I miss these guys. Who wouldn't want an online crew to support/critique their creations?

Really, that's what I'm here for. I miss writing but I really I miss having an audience to interact with. It's not as cool sounding as saying "I write for myself" but it's true.

Time will tell if (re)building a community like this is still viable in the age of digital micro-publishing and short attention spans. If you've read this far, we may just have a chance.

Let's embrace Discourse.

One of my goals with rebuilding foohonpie.com is to initiate, foster, and embrace meaningful and civil discourse. I'd love for us to share perspectives, break out of our echo chambers, and better ourselves intellectually.

As a developer, I used to take joy in writing the platform to do this. Nowadays, I avoid trying to create/eat my own dogfood.

On that note, discussion here is powered by Discourse, a beautiful, free, and open source solution for discourse (naturally). I am quite pleased with it so far, and am highly considering it as a replacement for the Imperial Conflict forums. Sorry PunBB!

Shout out to Ghost.

When I set out to relaunch this blog knowing that this time around I wasn't going to reinvent the wheel, I was very much attracted to Medium, a popular publishing platform. Unfortunately, it came up short in a few significant ways. Similarly, I also avoided Wordpress for some reservations I have as a developer.

Fortunately, I found Ghost, a free and open source blogging solution and have been nothing short of impressed and pleased with the experience.

Some thoughts on ads

We get bombarded by advertisement every single day and it gets pretty exhausting. I want nothing to do with that.

I don't have any higher monetization strategy with this website. However, if you enjoy my work here, I welcome your support via the Patreon Page for Imperial Conflict, my main side project. It is a fantastic way to give the finger to traditional advertising and a great way to say "Thank You" to independent creators even if it's just a buck.

Also, buy Beats brand headphones.

My name is Vince.

According to my standard social media blurbs:

Web developer, indie game developer, writer, musician, cartoonist. I love to create.

See? It says so right on my Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Web developer

I've been webdevving since 2003 as a hobbyist and professionally since 2006. I earned my chops doing Front-end and Email work for what was at the time a scrappy San Diego startup and am most recently doing Back-end and API work within the cosmetics industry.

Indie game developer

My most recent project is Imperial Conflict, a 2000s-era text MMORPG that I started playing in high school. I recently purchased it from its original owner to modernize for a new generation of players. Shout out to my IC peeps!

Writer

I am endlessly intrigued by the expressive power of written communication. This website exists as a platform to explore my favorite medium.

Musician

I don't have anything interesting to say about this one, but I might write a song about it someday.

Cartoonist

My most successful endeavor was a webcomic called S.N.A.T. that was partially based on myself and a few of my pals but was mostly based on fictional characters and a body-building Jesus.

I love to create.

It never ends. There isn't enough time in the day to do everything but dammit if I won't try.