James Williams.me

James is a standard issue nerd, practically to a fault. He was learning BASIC while his peers were learning to throw and catch. He enjoys walking around a well-lit 3D-rendered landscape but would prefer to stay indoors. He won't dance (don't ask him) but he will /dance and /manderville all night long. If you're interested in an in-depth analysis between the command techniques of various Starfleet captains, you are going to have a great time with James at parties (this is a lie: James doesn't go to parties).

Professionally, James is a seasoned developer with nearly two decades of experience. He enjoys all sorts of different programming languages, platforms, and programming methodologies. His own personal style is a spicy mix of functional and object-oriented: he even nearly understands monads!

When he's not working, he's probably poking at his personal programming projects. Beyond that: you might find him playing a turn-based RPG (or watching a Let's Play of a more action-oriented RPG), editing pictures in Photoshop, reading a novel with a spaceship on the cover, and always always always drinking far more tea than can possibly be wise.

(The lemur's name is Gary.)

James' Resume

My Recent Activity

Spending some time leveling my Black Mage while waiting for my static to unlock the Sirensong Sea.

Keeping track of the salient differences between Blizzard, Blizzard II, Blizzard III, Blizzard IV, and Freeze might all be beyond me.

I started playing P5R a couple weekends ago; but I've got a history of bouncing off of Persona games so I held off talking about it until I knew if it would stick or not.

For this play-through, I've got two advantages that are keeping me from quitting as I have so often before:

I am playing on Easy mode
The game came with a ton of DLC items and money that's really making it easy to ease in

My biggest issue with Persona games up until now has mostly been the clock: I'm not very good at games and I usually grind to make up for it, but it's hard to do that when there's a ticking clock hanging over your head.

Plus consumables and items have always been scarce so even if I make the time to grind, I don't necessarily have the resources to do so.

But Easy mode is solving the "need to grind" issue and the DLC is, so far, giving me many many many resources.

I'm still in the first Palace, so I don't know if I'll actually stick with it long-term.

But, for once, I have hopes that maybe I'll actually see the end of a Persona game.

It's been a minute, but my static has been dutifully working our way through the post-Heavensward patch content.

I finally got into Stormblood this weekend and have been having fun exploring the first two areas. The environments in this expansion are really quite pretty; the team levels up their environment design each expansion and it's fun to see the accelerated evolution as I work through them.

It's definitely getting to a point where the EXP curve is flattening and I'm starting to wonder about the sustainability of having so many jobs. But also, I like them all and don't want to choose!

At the very least, I need to pick one in each role. But the choice is tough.

6 hours in and just unlocked class switching and...I don't think this is for me.

The story seems great (so far), the graphics are good, the voice acting is fine to good, the music is a solid B+ at least but...

There are so many systems (collecting, turn-ins, arts, skills, classes, roles) and I find that I do not care about a single one.

I also don't enjoy the combat at all. It's either too boring to hold my interest or is too chaotic for me to have a chance to influence everything before a wipe.

I think I'm going to call it and move on to something else.

To some extent, I was reading this to evaluate if it would be a good book to hand to a new junior dev.

I'm not really sure. There are parts that I think are great and parts where I think that Mark gets off into some paths I don't love (notably TDD) a bit more than seems necessary.

I think I'd probably put this on a list of other recommended titles but not necessarily single it out.

As for myself, I'm not sad that I read it. It's a good refresher in a lot of ways.

I still haven't answered any questions about what I want this site to become.

But I realized that I forgot to add the X-Clacks-Overhead header to all of my responses, so I've fixed that (and added a few other novelty headers) so at least I'm not letting the site just rot.

I have started to think of Edge as "our special little boy".

As in, "He's just a weak lil' guy, he can't hurt nothin' and you don't need to go trying to beat him up. He's just our precious little boy!"

He reminds me of when I used to wear ninja masks as a little boy. I was also not actually good in a fight.

All Activity