[tap’s the mic] Test test, 1,2,3, is this thing on?

ahem— Welcome, dear reader, to my Tech-Stash, where I will publish written blogposts about various technology topics into this new and exciting World Wide Web!

Okay, enough of this. Hey there, I’m Laura Sofia, and I’ve been developing, designing for and playing around with technology for the last 20-ish years. Whether it’s the latest news in videogame development, recent webdevelopment standards or anything about the hundreds of unfinished projects on my to-do list, this is going to be the place where I will talk about it. But why would anyone in the age of Reddit self-posts, LinkedIn “My wife just died, this is what it taught me about our YoY MRR’s” posts and hour-long YouTube-videos about the most niche content create their own blog?

Data Ownership

I could’ve easily set up a medium blog as well. I could’ve paid a literal Nazi Elon Musk $10 monthly for article-posts on Twitter. But I’ve decided that, in an age where all of our content is stored and owned by one of the big mega-corporations, I want my higher-quality content to be available somewhere where I can’t easily be banned for posting public data.

AI webcrawler bots will steal my content anyway for “training purposes”, so why should I enable billionaires to get even richer from my potentially hard labor (this requires me to actually write posts, which is yet to be proven).

A stash for everything

This blog is called “Tech-Stash” for a reason. I am not aiming for clear continuity here. On some days I will release a blogpost about level-design in Portal 2, while on others I will publish a guide on how to set up your very own Navidrome server. There will surely also be stretches where I release multiple posts in one month and some, where I don’t put out anything. It’s a stash, after all.

Topics you can look forward to

Okay, now that we got all of this out of the way, what exactly will you be able to read about in this blog anyway? What will be the pillars of content I hopefully get to write about?

Video game development

When I’m not developing custom web modules for customers in a highly sales-oriented CRM/CMS system (aka HubSpot), I spend my time developing video games. While I’m working on my own indie-game Celestial Rescuers 2, I am also involved in the Valve-approved project Portal 2: Community Edition for one of my favorite video games of all time, Portal 2.

But that’s not all. While often used as a joke, I love LOVE working in custom (internal) tooling, so I have been involved in multiple developer tools for my game engine of choice, the open-source hit Godot. Currently, I have a very neat playtester/qa plugin in the oven and when I eventually have some time to actually finish it, you’ll be the first to know.

Web development

Ever since I was 11, I’ve loved developing content for the web. Back then, I still had to learn how to style a website with tables and use PHP 5 (the version everyone knows and remembers, also the version why everyone hates PHP to this day). But I’ve always wanted to know everything about the latest and greatest new features. Whether it was CSS Grid layouting or box-shadow styling, I’ve always been one to get into the recent proposals and test them out. I’d love to showcase some more recent advances in web development like View transitions (which this blog utilizes) and stylable select boxes.

Branding & UI design

Everyone needs some balance between their day-to-day job and creative projects in their free-time. My creative outlet often focuses on the parts that I don’t get to do often at work. Branding/UI work are two of those areas.

Our self-hosted stack

Yes, it’s true, I am among the many individuals who own a Raspberry Pi (well technically we have 3, but we currently only use one in our household for our self-hosted homelab). And since I love to automate the boring stuff and love to work on my own little Docker images that do things such as download game soundtracks from very legal sources to our Navidrome server, it would be a perfect fit for this blog.

Other stuff?

Well, there will surely be things I can talk about that don’t fit the topics above. For example, I could talk about how my random tweets resulted in interviews for articles on WIRED and GameDeveloper in the past. Or how just being active in a small discord landed me a job for a 600-people in-person convention for the third most-popular video game engine in the world.

Final words

I’ve been developing and tinkering with this blog for a while now, I’ve already started creating some outlines for other posts that you might eventually see on here. Now I just have to figure out if this blog/article format is something I like to do, and if I’m good enough of a writer for it… Well, we’ll see!