Building Quizzie: A Real-Time Quiz App in Boring Technology
I needed a quiz app for corporate training. Three npm packages, vanilla JavaScript, and a polling fallback later, it works everywhere - including networks that block modern web features.
Steve
HILL
Recent Posts
View all posts →Shipping Three Projects (and What Opus 4.5 Made Possible)
An assembly education platform, an iOS card game, and an artillery game I've been trying to build since the early 2000s. Claude finally got them over the line.
Building for the Failures You Can't Control
Early in my career, I built ticketing systems for arts venues. Our platform could be bulletproof - but if the client's backend fell over, the on-sale still failed. That taught me how to build resilience around dependencies I couldn't control.
Six Years After Warning About Microservices
In 2020, I wrote a theoretical warning about microservices. Then I spent three years inside 120 of them. Here's what the theory didn't prepare me for.
Sustainable Software, Revisited
In 2023, I wrote about sustainable software development. I focused on engineering practices. I should have focused on whether the business underneath could survive.
Boring Technology Wins
I've watched companies chase shiny technology for nearly two decades. The pattern is always the same: promises of elegance, delivered complexity, and teams that can't sustain it.
Build for Today, Design for Tomorrow
Most failed systems I've rescued weren't too rigid - they were too flexible. Built for futures that never arrived. I've spent years untangling the results.
Projects
View all projects →Chaotic Tanx
Artillery warfare on iOS with destructible terrain, physics-based ballistics, and turn-based multiplayer. Currently in TestFlight beta.
Code Like It's 198x
Learn assembly programming by building complete retro games on C64, ZX Spectrum, NES, and Amiga. Docker-based toolchains eliminate setup friction, so you can focus on understanding how computers actually work.
Rachel
A strategic card game with a twist: the last player standing loses. Play solo against AI, locally via Game Center, or online (coming soon). Based on 30 years of family tradition.
remark-shiki-highlight-api
Brings CSS Highlights API performance to your Markdown workflow. Perfect for technical blogs drowning in code examples - this Remark plugin delivers the same 90% DOM reduction without touching your build pipeline. Astro and Next.js ready.
shiki-highlight-api
Born from frustration with bloated syntax highlighting, this library slashes DOM nodes by 90% using the CSS Highlights API. What used to take 180KB and thousands of spans now takes 45KB and renders in a fraction of the time.