January 2023 has already been an explosive month for me and my work. During these first few days of the year I have already gotten so much done.<br>

⮺ SteamSecurity.org

As you may know, I am the lead developer of SteamSecurity. I handle most of the code that goes into it and SteamSecurity's public libraries. This month I was able to get a few of the libraries almost production ready. Many of the bugs that had been in them were crushed violently, and many error cases are already handled. At this point in development, I am mainly looking out for more bugs that creep up before me and my team feel ready to publish our 1.0 version of any of the libraries. Our goal is to get v1.0 out of the door by the 1st of March. By then we would have had almost one and a half months of testing by ourselves.<br>

We were hoping to receive community feedback by releasing the libraries as early as we did, however we didn't receive any. This is mostly because we hadn't advertised it in any form, excluding a footnote in our SteamSecurity About page. While this is not a setback, we did not get as big of a boost in development as we were hoping for.

This past I also got the site on a new database format that should be better than the format it was using before.<br> One last topic I would like to talk about is the SteamSecurity blog. I am currently in talks with our effective CEO to greenlight a SteamSecurity blog, and I may be able to get it running HUGO as well! This will allow us to communicate with our users without having to take them to some third-party application like Discord or even Matrix.

⮺ Project Scroller

I have been thinking a lot about social media an its impact on society as a whole. As someone who has extensively used the internet before the social media applications of today, I am stunned to see how many people almost rely on it to get though the day. I have seen many social media platforms come and go though out the years, more than the average person for sure. Relatively recently I had decided to look into many of the social media platforms and quite frankly I was shocked to see what they are doing. Data mining, social engineering, censorship, and the list just keeps going on. <br> After all of this time I have decided that if I will complain about the problems, I will at least offer a solution.<br> I ended up doing some more research and found plenty of FOSS social media sites such as Mastodon and MINDS. I have used Mastodon in the past and I found it very comfortable compared to Twitter. It is so good that I had tried to help raise awareness about it for years. The only thing that really hurts me about Mastodon is that the only reason it grew so much so fast in the past year is because Elon Musk purchased Twitter and started banning accounts selling CSAM. Say what you will about Musk, I am not here to defend him, but come on... really? <br> I have yet to try Minds out (Simply because I just do not have the desire to make any more social media accounts), however the features and the methodology seem compelling.<br> The one common thing these two platforms have is that they are both open source. My goal with Project Scroller is to make a solid platform that is entirely open source that aims to educate the world about any topic a user desires.<br> As it will be an open source project I intend on it being a non-profit that will help people around the world. I'm confident that this idea I have will not succeed as there are already an over abundant amount of social media platforms that exist. It is because of that reason I do not have Project Scroller as a high priority. I may make it just as a means to lean how to create apps for mobile devices.<br> In designing Scroller, I have learn that it is very difficult to design a social media application that works well for both mobile devices and home computers. You always have to sacrifice comfort for one or the other. I am confident I can get the right balance eventually, but as stated before, I am just not too worried about Project Scroller as of yet.

⮺ Project Exclusion

Game development is something that I have always wanted to get into. Ever since I first played Half Life 2 I wanted to get involved. I have had many ideas since my very early gamer days about what kinds of games I would enjoy making. Now more than several decades later, I finally get to start making real games! Project Exclusion is set to be one of (if not) the first games I will ever ship to production. As of now, I am still story-boarding everything, and making sure things make enough sense to be fun. I do not have too many details to share about Project Exclusion right now unfortunately, however as of right now, Project Exclusion is further along than Project Scroller simply because I have began actual work on the game.

⮺ Media and Videos

I am working on introducing more of a tutorial video channel on Linux and gaming as a whole. As with Project Exclusion I do not have much to share about these projects at this time, but once my feet are off of the ground, these tutorial videos will be hosted on a site much like this. The written tutorials won't be on this site, but a different HUGO site entirely. Stay tuned!