ButtonWeavers blog

A number of years ago, Chaos suggested that we deploy Button Men site updates on a regular deployment cycle. Personally, I had never deployed according to a regular deployment cycle before, not at uni or at work, so I didn't know why such a cycle would be useful, but I was more than happy to accept from Chaos's experience at her work that we would see benefits. For a long time, we had a deployment cycle that looked like this: the second and third weeks of the month were for accepting any pull requests that had passed code review and unit testing the last week of the month was for testing on a test server to attempt to find bugs in the code originating from recently accepted pull requests the first week of the month was a merge freeze, designed to allow us to focus on fixing bugs caused by the deployment to the live site This cycle worked quite well, I think, but there was always a large amount of work for the testers to be done in the one week before deployment, and ver...

There are times when I wonder whether I should try to tackle some issue related to the graphical user interface in Button Men. And then I wonder whether I shouldn't leave the issue to someone more capable. I am the first to admit that I have no real tendency towards graphic design, and I'm not awfully good at Javascript or CSS. However, I can usually muddle my way through to implement something that works and can be unit tested. My real dilemma, though, is that that testers often disagree strongly with me on what they consider to be important. My overriding concern is to get things done so that they are functional. I lose interest when people get hung up on issues of consistency, aesthetics, or emotional response. I've always felt that it was more important to make a new feature available for use as soon as possible, even if it still had some rough edges, than to delay it until it was implemented perfectly. The issue is not only related to me, though. Many pull req...

Those of you who have been paying attention would have noticed that I've started working on generating Button Men statistics for games played on the new site. If you're interested, you can see what I'm generating at http://stats.dev.buttonweavers.com/ui/stats/ . Currently, these are based on a cached copy of the database from 2017-07-07, but once we add the functionality to the live site, we'll be generating these at least once a day. As a sneak peek, here's a visual representation of the number of games played between each pair of buttons: Number of games played between pairs of buttons, with colour intensity scaled logarithmically

Updates are exciting in any web game, because they are a tangible demonstration to users that the devs are still actively maintaining and improving the site. Bugs get fixed, the user interface becomes easier to use, and every so often, new features see the light of day. However, to some users, it may seem that site updates on Button Men Online are few and far between. For a while, we were successful in maintaining a monthly release cycle, but that's proven to be impractical over the long term. So, why does it take so long to bring you new features? The most important consideration here is that the devs are busy people. One of the overriding considerations that we have always tried to honour is that Real Life comes first. So, while we might have nominal deadlines, these will always give way in the face of illness, work commitments and social events. We develop Button Men Online because we love both the game and the community, and we don't want the task of developing to becom...

For anyone who knows anything about web development, it may seem odd that we are using PHP for our back-end, especially since we made the decision in 2012, when there were many other feasible languages available. Here is the story of how we started out, and how we incidentally ended up being stuck with PHP. 12 Nov 2012 I broached the subject of resurrecting the Button Men Online site on the  Buttonmen Site Outage News  group, after nine months of downtime of the old site. One of the things that I left open was the choice of programming languages. 13 Nov 2012 After getting a bit of interest, I posted a suggestion on November 13 that we go with Python and PostgreSQL. Brooks chimes in that he is a Zend certified PHP developer, and suggests that Python frameworks may not be as robust as the Apache backend, and that the Apache backend is more widely supported on cloud architecture. He also mentions Pagodabox, which he uses for his PHP projects. Chaos posts that she knows Pyt...

A while back, I mentioned to Chaos that I was interested in sharing some of what the ButtonWeavers go through while we're working on Button Men Online . She thought it was a good idea, so we agreed to start a blog. So, what should you expect here? Well, I'll be starting with a couple of thoughts that I've had in the back of my mind, including a history of the new site, something about the mechanics of deployment, some recollections about skill interactions, and something about our priorities for the future. I'm also open to requests and suggestions for blog posts. Chaos has also expressed an interest in sharing some of her thoughts, and I'm looking forward to what she has to say. I think that it's wonderful that we've been able to revive the Button Men Online community. I'm committed to continuing to improve and expand our implementation of Button Men, and I hope that many of you will continue to enjoy the ride in the years to come. Oh yes, do...