Lewin Kelly Heliodex

Heliodex project update - July 2023

Almost forgot about this one! Here's the monthly project update again, I have several updates to existing projects and a new announcement.

Mercury

Several updates have been made to Mercury's website. Error pages are improved, the design of the landing page has been updated, and we moved from Sass to Stylus for styling, which allows multiline statements with a cleaner indented syntax. A couple of client bugs have been fixed as well.

Navigation for the site has been improved, with a much simpler bottom navigation bar for smaller screens. This allows us to get rid of the cumbersome hamburger menu, and alongside it, a significant amount of bloat from Bootstrap's CSS and JS. The top navbar has also been improved on larger screens.

The target audience is people who are familiar with Urbit's architecture, though not necessarily much of its code.

Plunder and Urbit

As some of you already know, i recently left my job as a core dev for the Urbit Foundation to work on a similar system called Plunder. Plunder was created in 2020 by two former Tlon employees, after their proposal for a new version of Nock was rejected. They have since reworked that significantly and built a reference implementation of their own system. You can follow its continued development on its mailing list.

I've known about Plunder for quite some time now, but their recently released demo -- in which the system is used to serve a 70 GB dataset, complete with metadata and searchable -- made me feel the need to explore it again and in greater detail. Doing this with my personal server doesn't feel like a big ask, but there is currentl

Heliodex project update - June 2023

Welcome back! Summer has begun, and I'll be able to work on projects more often over the coming weeks. Here's a summary of what's happened in June:

Mercury

Improvements to the asset system have been added, and we're working on a more cohesive moderation system for admins to allow users to upload their own assets to the website.

As always, many optimisations have been added to parts of the client and website. I and many other of the developers will be much more active in the near future, so expect more updates soon!

Heliodex project update - May 2023

Hello again! My qualifications for this year are complete, so I'll be able to put more work into more projects throughout the upcoming holidays.

Mercury

Mercury has recently introduced a new asset management system, and we're phasing out the original "Items" system previously present in the Avatar shop/Catalog. A basic avatar picture system was added, though we're working on a better system that allows rendering via the RCCService.

We've recently accepted new beta testers, and will likely be doing so monthly from now on.

Heliodex Project Update - April 2023

Sup. Mercury and a few other of my projects have received several updates during April.

Mercury

Since March, Mercury now has improved website forms, heavily optimised corescripts, improved site speed, and a basic popup notifications system. A status page is now available at status.banland.xyz, showing the uptime of Mercury's site and web services.

We've been experimenting with a new invite key system, which would allow users to invite others and help grow the community, as well as some other exciting features, helping to set Mercury apart from similar websites.

Heliodex Project Update - March 2023

Almost forgot about the project update for this month. Over the course of April and May, I still have a bit of work to finish for some of my qualifications.

Mercury

Over the past month, Mercury acquired some new beta testers and suspended some inactive ones, so now totals over 50 users. Beta development has continued with many new features being added, including forum posts and replies, moderation system, improved banners, migrating from nginx to Caddy, and notifications.

I've experimented with some libraries like SvelteKit Superforms, which I've found useful and makes form validation a lot simpler. I also found out about Civet, which is like a combination between CoffeeScript and TypeScript, both languages I love. Would also love to write some code for Mercury in it, but SvelteKit support requires a few hacky workarounds at the moment.

Heliodex Project Update - February 2023

Welcome back. During this month and the next I have several assignments, but have still been able to do lots of development work.

Mercury

Still in Beta, development is continuing on Mercury at blistering speed. We recently launched the 2013 Windows client alongside the ability to join games from the website. Client development seems extremely like dark magic to me as I have little idea on how it actually works.

Heliodex Project Update - January 2023

Despite this month being packed with prelim exams, it had probably the most Github commits I've made in a single month.

Mercury

This project is the source of most of these commits. Mercury (v2) is a Roblox private server with a tech stack of Node, SvelteKit, and Typescript, in stark contrast with most revivals' use of PHP-based stacks. It's being created by a team with the people who worked on the original Mercury 1, and development is moving extremely quickly.

The project was my first time really managing databases, for which the project uses Postgres with Prisma as well as Redisgraph. Graph databases are a lot easier to do a ton of stuff with, and I have loved using them so far.

Heliodex Project Update - December 2022

Happy Hogmanay & New year. These are the December updates to my projects.

Typing Tester

The typing game was finally given a name and, on Christmas day, was released (very anticlimactically).

It doesn't have any players yet because I have no experience with building communities. Linked the Discord server to the group and game page though.

	"civet deno"
	* as c from "https://deno.land/[email protected]/fmt/colors.ts"

	console.log()

	encodeLetters: { [k: string]: string } :=
	a: "@"
	b: "b"
	c: "("
	d: "6"