When I brought HashtagLove to a local meetup, I got a valuable opportunity to observe new players interacting with the game for the first time. While watching them play, I noticed something interesting—and concerning. Many players seemed to get stuck in a loop, picking tweets almost at random. Of course, this made sense: they had no prior knowledge of the system and didn’t necessarily have a strong preference for one of the three main topics right away. This observation led…

Lessons from Global Game Jam 2025 Last weekend, I took part in the Global Game Jam 2025, diving into 48 hours of creativity, problem-solving, and game development. This year’s theme, bubbles, inspired me to create HashtagLove, a game that explores social media echo chambers and algorithm-driven interactions. It was also my first time doing the jam solo, which led to some interesting challenges and insights. After finishing to read, check out the product at https://thenerdautomaton.itch.io/hashtaglove From Vision to Reality: The…

Game jams and hackathons are not just about coding marathons or technical problem-solving. These dynamic environments provide unique opportunities for developers to break away from their usual routines, explore new ideas, and grow in unexpected ways. The idea for this blog post came from my entry into the code.talks 2024 conference. It took way to look to still publish it, but here it is: seven invaluable lessons I’ve learned from participating in such events over the years: 1. Creativity Can…

Or something like that. Recently I spent some weekends on a small NFT generation project. One could say, it was for work, but it really wasn’t. In truth I built it for me. You can find the source code here: https://github.com/DyosTheNerd/SRRNFTVoucherService And a running prototype on the mumbai polygon testnet here : https://feather-diamond-virgo.glitch.me/ Engineering the project Why do I say, it could be for work? Because I implemented a website that uses the new “Issue” API we lauch at work.…

I created a new Gitlab project under https://gitlab.com/JDWTheNerdAutomaton/opendecentralisedtrust/ Its about the question whether or not a system can be build that allows a rating of its users by other users and preserves privacy of data and interactions for all users. There are a lot of problems when trying to build this without a centralized point of trust, first and foremost the question why you should participate in such a system. Then there is the question of how it can be…

So, Blockchain is all the rage. I am getting into development. Currently I work as a freelancer for a Ethereum based Blockchain startup. It is interesting work, and a whole new set of problems and ideas follow out of it. Regardless what happens to the freelance project, I am planning to learn more about it. Especially Cardano seems like an interesting project, which ties in to some of the things I enjoyed during my studies: Provable correctness of code for…

This must be the thousandth time, I came here again after a while to post something, but I hope the next post will not be too far in the future. This post is more about myself and my current life situation and not directly related to software development. However, I believe, that personal growth and mental health are important for everyone of us working in the IT industry. So I moved to Japan with my wife, and I am currently…

I made a little pixel art concept for a space elevator hotel, which is the scene for an adventure game I am planning to work on.

This is Part 2 of the computer science theory behind the Train Automaton game. It describes the impact of player input on the automaton as well as the thing that makes a language a language: symbols or in this cases: train stations. The first part will covers the initial state machine. Under the hood, the game is based on non deterministic finite automata (NFA), a computational model to describe regular languages or the more commonly used regular expressions. In Computer…

Finally after a long pause, I got back up to release the Train Automaton. To celebrate this, have a look at the trailer, and maybe download the game from the google playstore or for Windows PC on itch.io. Find the game here for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/de… and for PC: https://thenerdautomaton.itch.io/trai…