A few months ago I made a lightning talk for Djangocon EU 2021 regarding Data Classes and their usage for self documenting your code. I've included the video here for posterity.

Since I made this video I've actually realised that if you can type hint something you definitely should. It's funny how my experience of the python language has changed from it's amazing how dynamic it is to please, please, please go back to static typing everywhere.

I will likely write a post in the future expanding on this, but for now enjoy the video!

As part of my ongoing writings about what I've been enjoying I really felt like I had to mention how much I've started to enjoy podcasts this year.

This has been a bit of a shock to me because I've always struggled to focus on audio alone. Usually when listening to something my mind will end up focusing on the action I am performing rather than anything I'm listening to causing me to miss minutes at a time. It's truly in one ear, out the other.

This led to the only time I ever really tried to listen to them was in bed just before falling asleep. This wasn't great because as you might have guessed every single time I would fall asleep instead of finishing the podcast. I cannot count the amount of All Killa episodes that I have heard the first twenty minutes of multiple times but never got around to finishing.

So what changed? As an avid fan of The Parapod I've been a subscriber to the Patreon of both hosts, Ian Boldsworth and Barry Dodds, for over a year now and the amount of audio content I receive in exchange is staggering. Realising that I had hours and hours of podcasts by them to listen to, I made a concerted effort to listen to them during the day I think this has finally got my brain to try and listen to background audio rather than letting it slip away.

This effort has been rewarded by some of the genuinely funniest stories I have ever heard in my life. The series where both Ian and Barry work together (Parapod, Dodds Incarcerated and Ideas Man to name a few) are just so brilliant. Barry never fails to go off on some brilliant tangents and Ian is absolutely perfect at leading Barry to the next big story. As well as this they both produce fantastic solo work as well whether it's audio, video or text. If I could get you to do anything it would be to chuck a few quid at both of them and just go through the backlog of posts available. I doubt you would regret it. Not to mention they have made a film as well!

All in all, I'm really glad that I've improved my ability to listen to podcasts. I know in the grand scheme of things this is extremely minor but the joy it has brought my life over the past few months has been worth every second.

Isn't Tom Hanks amazing? To get through the surprisingly chilly week we have been watching Tom Hanks films. There are some spoilers for Cast Away and Captain Phillips later in this article so be warned.

This started with watching The Da Vinci Code instead of Silence Of The Lambs due to the absence of it on Netflix - definitely a tonal change there! We then finished the Robert Langdon series of films by watching Angels & Demons and Inferno.

Now to be honest here, these films aren't the greatest despite the inclusion of Tom. The Da Vinci Code was the best of the bunch and it goes quickly downhill from there.  Despite this they are enjoyable and Angels & Demons includes a book vandalism scene that very unexpectedly shocked me to my very core and I'm still not over it.

To make up for our disappointing choice to watch some bad Tom Hanks movies we resolved to finish the week by watching some good ones. I had never seen Cast Away and with it's recent addition to Netflix it seemed the perfect time to rectify that.

It was a really enjoyable experience and it has provoked a number of discussions since. I personally think that after four years on an island I would be incredibly bored but my partner maintains you would have so much stuff to keep up with that you would just always be on the go leaving no time left to get bored with. We do agree that he returns to normalcy incredibly quickly at the end though, where four weeks after being rescued he is casually having parties and expecting to go back to work. I imagine in real life the experience would be so traumatic that it would be years before you could reintegrate into society.

Next we watched Captain Phillips which was my personal favourite of the films we saw last week. It was a gripping story from start to end and Tom Hanks was absolutely incredible in it. I found myself sympathising with the Somalian pirates depicted and their naivety of the situation that found themselves in. Everybody knew it wouldn't end up well for them once the Navy were involved but I still hoped they would see sense. At the end of the film we agreed that Tom Hanks did one of the most convincing portrayals of shock that we have seen in a film so hats off to him for that.

To round it up we ended on Philadelphia. Tom Hanks absolutely knocked it out of the park in this one and his best actor academy award is 100% justified.

All in all, the past week of Hanks has been thoroughly enjoyable and it makes me want to pick someone else and do a similar marathon. Any suggestions?

[Ever so slight spoilers to follow - mainly a picture of unlocked cards]

Along with one hundred and fifty thousand others, I have recently jumped into Loop Hero and I couldn't resist writing about my dilemma. At this point I have around fifteen hours played and I have unlocked enough to get a feel for how the game will play out.

I just don't know if I like it or not.

Do you ever get that? When you have consumed a piece of media so much that you think you must enjoy it  but simultaneously it isn't quite hitting the spot. Right now I feel a compulsion to play more but whenever I load it I last ten or so minutes before I turn it back off and question why I started.

For the uninitiated Loop Hero is a roguelike card game where you have a hero character that automatically walks around a path and battles any enemies. Enemies drop cards and equipment when defeated, the quality of which depending on the difficulty of the monster. The cards are used to add locations to the map with each location providing a different effect including spawning different monsters, adding ways to heal your hero or increasing their stats. The equipment is also used to increase your hero's stats and to provide survivability bonuses, for example one stat is evasion which is the percentage chance you will dodge an attack. When you finish a loop you go back to your camp where you can build new buildings which provide your bonuses such as the ability to resurrect or they unlock more cards for you to use in subsequent runs.

The interesting part of this is you can combine cards to trigger certain events which you have to find out through experimentation. For example if you place a vampire mansion next to a village, the village will become a ransacked village due to the vampires presence. If you survive enough loops the ransacked village is then transformed again into a different village entirely.

This experimentation is a key part of the game and provides a lot of incentive to play just so you can try and discover all the combinations. This extends to what monsters you place as well - do you place a lot of easier enemies which will allow you to cycle through cards quickly at the expense of the rarity of the loot dropped or do you focus on a smaller number of high risk engagements? Even after fifteen hours I'm still not sure the true relationship between monster difficulty and rewards and whether different monsters are more likely to give me specific cards and I definitely feel a need to find out the answer to this.

So far so good right? I find it interesting and engaging and I want to see more, so why do I feel like quitting it whenever I start playing? I think the answer lies in the following: repetition, speed and difficulty.

The repetition part comes from a lot of your core card actions will be exactly the same. Once you have discovered a few combinations you tend to replay a core set of them every single run. This tends to also coincide with the start of each run so the initial stage of the game feels essentially the same with barely any change. Similarly the equipment dropped by monsters is also generally uninteresting at the start of each run so there is no joy to be found there. I think this is why I drop off very quickly at the moment - when your first experience when loading is the same slog it's very hard to push yourself past it to the fun parts.

It also straddles a line between being too slow to keep you engaged but at the same time too fast to leave alone. As the hero automatically walks and attacks the only actions you have as a player is to place cards and equip new loot. It would be fine if I could leave it for a few minutes and then come back and do a large number of actions, rinse repeat. Unfortunately it demands just enough attention from you that you can never leave it alone for long - if you don't place your cards they get recycled and you always need to upgrade your equipment to maintain survivability and damage output. These moments come in short bursts though and are spaced just too slightly far apart - just as your brain disengages it is suddenly required again. These disconnects make maintaining interest far harder than it should be.

My issue with the difficulty may be unique to me and I'm sure others will praise this part or tell me to "git gud" but so far I am finding it impossible to progress past the second boss. This usually wouldn't be a problem, however the issue lies with the experimentation, the same experimentation which makes Loop Hero great, which is there is an extreme lack of feedback of why I am losing. Am I placing too many monsters? Is my loot not good enough? Do I need to go back to my camp and build some new buildings? All three of them? I have absolutely no idea. Without resorting to an external guide I feel like the only way for me to find this out is to throw more hours into the game and hope I make a connection, whereupon our old friend repetition rears it's ugly head again. There is also some disconnects between energy damage and hero healing potential which I think makes surviving harder than it should be.

Yet I am left with a desire to finish this game. I want to find out why I am failing. I want to know what I'm doing wrong. I want to know what cards I have yet to unlock. I want to know how strong I can make my hero. I want to do everything possible, I just wish the game wasn't fighting me every step of the way.

This is where I leave it: a game that I find frustrating and laborious to play but I know that tomorrow I will launch it again to start just one more run. Maybe that will be the run where it all clicks and I start progressing again but I suspect it'll be another one where I quit after 10 minutes.

Like everyone in the UK currently we have been trapped inside during the post christmas lockdown which has led to a need for indoor hobbies - enter puzzles!

Before this year I think the last puzzle I had attempted would have been 20+ years ago so it might have been a mistake to start with a 1000 piece puzzle from a company called Impuzzibles.

My naïve mind thought that having a slowly graduating set of colours would result in an easy to follow puzzle that a novice like me could easily achieve. Alas it turned out that my eyesight is absolutely appalling at noticing similar colour shades.

Fortunately I had my partner at hand who is absolutely amazing at distinguishing colours so through enlisting her help we started to really crack on with it.

In the end I managed to finish about a third of the puzzle while she completed the rest. Pretty good going for a first attempt I think!

This has led to a puzzle frenzy spurred on by my partner's love of working on them. I've now lost count of how many we have completed, ranging from puzzles found in her parent's loft, to murder mystery puzzles I grabbed from ebay. I find the murder mystery puzzles especially fun as they present you with a murder mystery where the answer is in the puzzle itself - you don't get any picture to help you so you have to make it completely blind. To keep with the Oxfordshire setting we have done a couple of Inspector Morse mysteries where one puzzle was so faded it was just pale blue and one golf course murder mystery. I completely forgot to take a photo of the faded Morse puzzle though which I now regret.

At this point I think I am all puzzled out though while my partner and her parents are still continuing. While I may be taking a break from puzzles for now I won't forget the fun and the time shared over these trying times completing them.

Header Image By Jared Tarbell - Flickr: sky puzzle, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31953973

It's taken a while but here we are: I now have a working blog. This will be a area where I post my general thoughts and musings on different subjects and also to practise writing blogs in general.

I'm currently using the default theme included with ghost (Casper) but I may take a crack on a custom one in the future - watch out for it if it happens!

Thanks for reading,

Jeff