Come along on a digital journey with me.

This post marks the official launch of a personal blog on software engineering (blog.tolrendor.io), on any topic in this field which interests me, but predominantly in the areas of web front end and cloud-based deployments.

I am actively involved in developing applications in these areas, and I expect to post about my learning, the patterns I uncover, and the libraries and techniques I discover and like.

The context of my application development will also come up from time to time. One of my other passions in fantasy role-playing, and I have always enjoyed the mix of RPGs and technology, and have written about this in the past on my other personal RPG blog: tolrendor-world.net.

As far back as 2012 I had a occasional column about technology in the RPG world (RPG Tech Talk), particularly as virtual table tops and other digital tools such the D&D 4E Character Builder started to become more prevalent. If you read my columns however, you will definitely see my frustration that although there are some great tools on the market, there was not back then, and I still believe this to be the case, a great ecosystem. Everything new application or tool that comes out ends up duplicating loads of functionality, requiring you to use their entire platform exclusively, rather than being able to plug different tools together seamlessly.

This was the motivation to start developing an ecosystem of RPG tools that would interoperate, but also provide APIs so that other developers could develop their own versions of the tools that could be plugged in seamlessly.

This blog intends to be the journal of that journey …