Our primary focus is changing...
Back in Spring of 2024 we left corporate System Administration. We have been exploring indepenent game development since and we are fast approaching something between a proof-of-concept and hopefully by the winter, something akin to a very rough play-test build of our first game.
That doesn't mean we've given up on System Administration; in fact it means we self host all-the-things we did before and continue that trend in support of our gamedev journey using libre, free and open source technology. This is exciting in a few ways because we are forced to use new tools and build new systems outside the scope of the corporate cesspit and into a more, bootstrapping experience. We plan to continue our work here in the blog but returning visitors will notice most of our calls for tech support are now gone, many longstanding pages aimed at targeting customers are unpublished, while we focus on what matters - our own projects. We even migrated our workstations to KDE's Plasma desktop after championing Ubuntu Mate for years.
Since we migrated away from the pre-existing 2024 hosts at that time, our index (the homepage) has reached no less than 324,285 visitors. Out of those visits 6,834 are unique. Out of those unique visitors the number of humans who donated to help us with hosting costs or just tip us for an helpful article has been ZERO. Reader comments have fallen off the wayside from our old CComment system. Its a little disheartening.
We made a promise a long time ago to never host ads on this blog and never will. We are not interested in creating memberships or by pay-walling knowledge. We continue to provide opt-out analytical tracking and what we do track is actually, truly anonymous. We believe in open exchange of ideas and hopefully, some of you found our articles interesting and inspired you to try something new, if not discover a solution. Our most popular articles remain OSMand Live Traffic Maps, and how to easily set up Apache Guacamole for remote work. We have new versions of these articles' content, and docker has made using Guacamole even easier to use these days. We have other tech solutions that we may share in the future but they are likely to circle back to game development or information technology that supports game development.
You will notice from our last several posts they are more focused on gamedev adjacent topics and the frequency has stalled tremendously. This is because of 1) we don't see a financial viable reason to keep exposing our experience for free in favor of working on other projects, and 2) AI bots and LLMs continue to hound original human-created content relentlessly and its become increasingly likely readers won't even visit if they can get our content automatically in a chat or the top of a Google search result. In a word, it sucks.
All in all, we'll continue to post here though it will be much more infrequent.
We've become active on Bluesky: @gripfastgame.works and in case you are interested in any gdscript tools, you can check out our Itch.io page here: https://gripfastgameworks.itch.io/. Finally you can find all of our other social media links here: https://linktr.ee/gripfastgameworks.
