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🇬🇧🇺🇸 What I've been up to lately

Vlad Calin

• 3 min read

Long time no write! It's been like two or three months since the last time I posted something on this blog, and I'm going to tell you why.

I have been pushing real hard with my current job (being the CTO of an early tech company that is seeing more and more traction, way more than we anticipated, which brought to light a lot of code problems - the good kind of problems to have, about scaling the codebase, features, performance and internal processes), and also with my personal projects (two new personal projects in fact).

With Vuuh

At Vuuh, things have been pretty hectic lately, more than usual (as they tend to be in the startup world). New clients of various sizes come to us every day to help them solve their data issues, and we need to cater to all of them, as much and as fast as possible. For now we manage, and the fact that we have built an awesome team so far (we hire just the best of the best) is surely helping a lot. We are starting to scale up our operations as well, and hopefully becoming one of the most known names in the local tech market in the following year or so.

With personal projects

In the personal projects space, I started and have been actively working at both in the same time for the past two months.

DevXBlog

You might have noticed that my blog looks different now. The reason being the fact that I built my own tech blog engine, named DevXBlog.

You might ask "Why? There are like a bazzilion blog engines out there such as Wordpress or Ghost and you already had a blog before that looked way better than this one".

And I'll say "You're right... what am I doing with my life?".

I built DevXBlog out of frustration with the current ecosystem of blog engines. All the existing ones either require you to host it for the basic features you need such as having HTTPS, uploading media files, to not mention the fact that most blog engines do not support code blocks really well (if at all). And me wanting to write about tech and putting some code blocks from time to time just added to the already existing frustrations.

So, I created DevXBlog for these reasons and I plan to build a MicroSaaS around it and monitize it at some point. But not yet, because I still have a few more features I need to build before starting asking for money (eg. better themes which are also mobile responsive, an Addon area where you can activate various plugins and integrations, a bare minimum dashboard to give you some basic aggregated analytics for your website).

You can see it at https://devxblog.com

Space and Profits

Space and profits is one of my indie game dev projects, that I work on using the Godot game engine. I almost finished up the core systems, and I am slowly transitioning to updating the artstyle and adding some "juice", so that afterwards I can release a demo. After that, the target would be to acquire as much user feedback as possible and spend a lot of time and effort into putting a lot of new content out.

Right now, the core features that are implemented are:

  • procedurally generated "universe" with star systems and planets. Each planet has a single biome, and moving between planets in the same system is rather cheap, but moving between systems is more expensive. The content isn't that impressive yet, the biomes look and work almost the same with only some color differences, but I plan to add new minable ores, plants and even alien creatures that are specific to each biome. Something like "Oxygen not included" and "Don't starge" (I'll admit, these two games and "No man's sky" are the inspiration for this game).
  • Resource gathering - you can mine stuff, get resources, and manage those resources to build more advanced stuff and advance the game.
  • Buildings - build things like factories where you can produce those advanced materials or items, that can then be used for various purposes (eg. as fuel, building materials, trading)

Some systems that I still plan to add:

  • Research system - unlock buildings and new materials based on spending some research points. Or buy them from the research companies
  • Companies - various "factions" that act throughout the galaxy, and depending on their type, they carry specific actions. For example, trading companies will own various trade points and buy/sell different specific materials, research companies will give you exploration quests and sell research related stuff.
  • Lore - I have built a lore that I am happy with, involving the humans, three alien races and one sentiend droid race, who interact with each other and have different relationships (good or bad).
  • Character customization

You can see it at https://spaceandprofits.com or https://csvgames.com. I haven't posted screenshots yet, because the graphics are ... well ... not there yet.

Conclusion

Well, that would be about it. I will start posting again soon about each project, about their progress, and other topics in general. The writing hiatus is over if I want to reach my "new year resolution" of writing 24 posts this year.