Michael Banzon

Kicking Off My Indie Game Dev Journey with Godot

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve always dreamed of creating my own video game — and now I’m finally doing it. This blog will follow my journey from zero to (hopefully) hero in the world of game development.

While I have a decent background in software development, game dev is a completely new territory for me. After some research and lots of recommendations, I’ve decided to go with the Godot engine. It’s open-source, growing in popularity, and supported by a strong community — which makes it a great starting point.

So… I made this app!

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In a single crazy evening, half vibe coding, half annoyed by the need, I made an app.

What is it?

The app is for making a slideshow of images.

Plain and simple.

You load the page, you drag images and folders of images to the field on the screen, you click “Start” and then you watch your beautiful images.

You can set the order to be randomized. You can set the interval between the images. You can start, stop, pause, resume and step forwards and backwards. All pretty useful but simple stuff.

Steam Deck: My Initial Thoughts

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just bought a Steam Deck!

It’s awesome!

My Steam Library

I have over 300 games on Steam and no time to play them!

And I don’t even have a Windows PC anymore!

I have been playing games on my macOS machine(s) for a while now but not all my games are macOS compatible.

But it turns out that most of them are Steam OS compatible! 🤘

The machine

A small handheld Arm powered machine with a nice OLED screen and way-better-than-expected battery life - what’s not to like?!

My first talk with Ollama

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I installed Ollama on my Raspberry Pi 4.

Everything is slow, because the Pi only have 2 MB RAM - I would not recommend this to anyone! Swap is enabled, but speed is lacking!

The following is my first conversation. I did shoot myself in the foot as I used the deepseek-r1:1.5b model.

I have no idea why it struggled this hard with hello world.

You can judge the conversation yourself.

The conversation

>>>> What model are you?

About Calendars in Apps

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We all use calendars - but I fear we don’t use them enough, and that we use them for the wrong things!

I imagine that most of us use a calendar to guide our daily activitites. It might be a calendar on our computer/phone, on paper, or even in our mind.

What is a calendar?

In my opinion a calendar should be used to mark events that are locked in time. That means that if I have an event in my calendar on Saturday between 13:30 and 15:00 I am (somewhat) busy in the period of time, doing whatever that event is.

How to gracefully shut down a Go server

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

When doing an HTTP server in Go the call to http.ListenAndServe(...) will block until the server stops. But it shouldn’t stop. Ever.

That leaves us with a problem - we might want to stop the server!

There might be various reasons. Maybe we want to replace the binary with an updated version. Maybe we just want it to not run.

Fortunately instead of using the default .ListenAndServe(...) we can create our own http.Server like this:

End tags in PHP

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m getting back into PHP.

This is a good thing (but more on that later!).

It has been years since I’ve been programming PHP and therefore this might seem as old news to everybody else that is doing just a little PHP programming every now and then:

You don’t have to close your PHP start tag!

Normally I’d have a file like this:

<?php

echo 'Hello world!';

?>

… and this works perfectly well.

Programming the Raspberry Pi with Go

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have a couple of Raspberry Pis in the house. They are used for various tasks - from hardware experiments to server tasks.

One of the big advantages of writing Go is the ability to cross compile code to other platforms than the one you are using the compiler/toolchain on. Anyone who has tried cross compiling code in C eg. will know how annoyingly difficult this is! With Go you have two environment variables that control the output of the compiler - GOOS will control the target operating system and GOARCH will control the target architecture.

Embracing the facts - software have errors

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Errors in software is one of those things that can be frustrating and it can lead to trouble - both internally and externally - for software development teams. Getting in control is key to success - both for the team and the users!

Scaling Web Applications

Mon, 08 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Scaling web applications is not trivial.

But what are the reasons to scale? How can you scale?

This article will describe some reasons for scaling along with scaling strategies.

Generating random numbers

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s go crazy and generate some random numbers!

But are they truly random? And why are we generating them?!

Changelogs

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

What is a changelog and why is it good to have? I mean - you have your commit comments and they should cover all the details about changes to the code, right?

Writing Comments in Code

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When programming you write code - possibly a lot. It’s a safe bet that much of the code you write is in fact the product of your brilliant mind and that it makes perfect sense - to you!

About User Privileges

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Web applications and other multi-user systems need to authenticate users. When users are authenticated they have access to selected resources - in some systems access is granted to everything but in most systems access in only granted to selected stuff.

Let’s discuss two methods to distinguish user privileges in multi-user systems.

Push? Pull? Websockets?

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Communicating with a backend - the communication between a server and a client - needs to be optimized to meet the users expectations of the application. This might seem rather vague but any application is met with a set of expectations specific to its user base and circumstances surrounding the typical use.

I’ll go over some possible solutions here.

Is your server even running?

Tue, 22 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In this article I will describe how to set up some basic server monitoring and some very useful alarming using Datadog. This comes in many variants - but I’ll show how to do this on a Ubuntu Linux server.

Choosing a platform

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing the right development platform is important. Very important!

Think of the platform as the language and library choices along with the environment where the solution is to be deployed - the full stack.

In this article I’ll go over some of the choices for platform I have made and why.

How to: Manage swap space

Fri, 01 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

A default cloud server at both Digital Ocean and Rackspace does not have any swap space allocated. This might cause your applications to fail when you run out of physical memory on the machine.