What I Built This Week

Busy week — 28 projects touched, 32 commits, and a theme that kept surfacing whether I was working on a game or a server migration: I'm tired of paying for things I can run myself. The big move was getting a homebase server properly loaded up as the backbone for everything else, and that decision bled into almost every project I opened.

Dicebag — the game I can't stop playtesting

This one started a few weeks ago as a dice-pool roguelike and this week it finally started feeling like an actual game rather than a proof of concept. The catalyst was a playtesting session where I found the board layout annoying (7 dice in one row, 3 in another — ugly and hard to scan) and the "ones" face completely useless. I sent in a series of tuning interventions and what came out the other side was genuinely surprising in scope: 13 commits on July 7th alone, adding consumables in a 2-slot pouch, run-wide boss boosts (Steady Hand, Combo College, Doggo Whisperer), counting die modifiers for prime/even/odd/heavy rolls, gold and crystal editions, and a Farkle combo where five 1s stack a +20 bonus on five-of-a-kind. The board is now a clean 2×5 grid.

The design decision I'm most pleased with: when you're offered a loaded die at draft, it now tells you the loaded number (e.g. "Loaded Die 3") instead of making you guess. Obvious in retrospect, but nobody does this in the games it's aping. I also asked for a brainstorm on roguelike modifiers for counting-based games and got back a list that's going to keep me busy for another two weeks. This one is live, actively branching, and I've started thinking about how to bring in other developers — so this week also included setting up proper git hygiene: clean main branch, feature branches, CI, and contributor docs.

Homebase as the center of gravity

The homebase server (a Linux box with 32GB of RAM sitting on my local network) quietly became the subject of half a dozen separate sessions this week. The most concrete output was sports-crons — a fully containerized cron harness using supercronic, with MLB ingestion already vendored in, failure isolation, and a paging policy. It went from nothing to a Dockerfile and six commits in a single day. The idea is that homebase runs the scrapers, stores the databases, and serves up notebooks — so I can open a Jupyter session from anywhere and have the compute there instead of on my laptop.

The other homebase thread was voice. I want a local text-to-speech pipeline for a video-essay project and I've been paying per-character for ElevenLabs. This week I explored swapping in Kokoro-82M as a permanent British-male narrator, then immediately asked how hard it would be to add an upbeat Australian, a Kiwi, an Indian accent, an Eastern European, a Latin American, a "true Canadian" (the Letterkenny brief was my exact words), and a Middle American. The answer involved MeloTTS and storage estimates per model. Nothing shipped yet but the data_explorer repo now has a VOICES.md and a tts_elevenlabs.py that I'm actively planning to retire.

Diving into side income (literally)

Two separate sessions this week came out of the same realization: I have years of scuba diving footage sitting on SSDs and I've been doing almost nothing with it. One session went in the direction of sleep mixes — pulling clean audio from my best dive clips (no tank banging, no weird breathing artifacts) and looping them into something people would actually put on at night. That spawned a breathing analysis angle I didn't expect: it turns out you can chart breathing rate improvements across dives over the years, and I got a script that does exactly that. The dive channel repo got four commits including a batch retitle of 25 pending Shorts with curiosity-hook titles and a MorningPublish routine for automated uploads.

The other session was about monetizing the footage directly through Adobe Stock. I'm Canadian, which added a wrinkle, but the setup worked. I asked for a final human review gate before any batch upload, which turned into a clickable preview flow — that detail was actually enjoyable to use. The pipeline (stock_prep.py, stock_export.py, stock_deliver.py) is sitting in the dive-channel repo and needs one more session to go from "designed" to "running."

July 7th is a wall of green — that's the Dicebag blitz, 10 of the 13 game commits landing in a single day after I came back from playtesting frustrated. The rest of the week was lower-intensity but more spread out, which tracks: homebase planning, job hunt automation, and the dive projects are all slow-burn sessions rather than sprints.

The job hunt is the quiet background thread I don't talk about much but it ran every single day this week. A buddy referred me into the Wealthsimple pipeline, so now there's a watcher that commits whenever their open roles change — three of those commits landed this week. I also asked whether we were searching LinkedIn postings yet. We were not. Now we are.

— rickleberry