Posts on Mongoose Studios

The Face of Your Father

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Mon, 04 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed

Only one book has ever grabbed my attention on the first line. That book, of course, being The Gunslinger. The line, unsurprisingly, is the one above. I read the whole series, and I can understand why people have mixed feelings. It’s a weird series, other King stories get mixed up in the weird world presented. But I remember it fondly.¹

The Internet Is Fun Again

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

0. Forward

The bulk of this post was written during the peak of the cultural exchange. So if you’re about to say “ok, but it’s not that way now” then just hold your horses, we’ll talk about that at the end.

1. The Event

I opened Twitter to look to see what a couple of my Twitter friends were up to and see if there was anything interesting to comment on. I do that periodically, I’ve talked about it before. A lot. Usually Twitter is kinda trash. Someone’s arguing with someone else about something, some stupid asshole is trying to tell us there will be no jobs in 6 months for the third or fourth year in a row. That sort of thing.

Docs are UX Too

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Programmer Art

I’m a back-end developer. If you have come to a stream you will either already know this, or be surprised by this. If the latter you probably just think I’m a really bad developer. I have spent most of my time making things that take command line arguments or stdin inputs. Some of the things I have worked on have a web UI, but it was someone else’s job to build it, I just give them a nice REST API to call.

Projects

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Struggles

I’ve been putting off writing this blog. For one, I wasn’t sure what I want to say this month. The world outside feels like it has been more of the same crap. More insane stuff happening. More terrible job market. More layoffs in the news. I think part of the problem is that I’m on social media again, and even though I try to curate a lot of that crap out it still creeps in. Because everyone is talking about it all.

Stream Retrospective 2025

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

1. Wowsers, a year!

January marks the one-year anniversary of me streaming. I didn’t actually record the first date I streamed anywhere, but as far as I can tell based on other data points it was sometime in the first few weeks of January. So I’m going to just go with January as the origin of the stream.

This is actually completely by coincidence, because I don’t believe in new years resolutions. I believe in starting that thing you want to do right now, whatever it is. There’s no time like the present to make meaningful progress toward that thing. It just so happened that I got all the pieces together and assembled the necessary skills, knowledge, and abilities to make a halfway informed attempt at running a stream around that time.

State of the Studio, 2025 Edition

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

1. Wowsers, a year!

I started setting things up for the channel in December of last year. I didn’t actually start streaming until mid-January but December is where the idea started to become reality. So let’s talk about the state of Studios.

This might be a little confusing to people that aren’t me, so let me clarify real quick.

Mongoose Studios is a vehicle for my ideas/ventures/brand. Streaming is one thing that Mongoose Studios does. Software development is another thing that I do, even if a lot of it is on stream. If I were to branch out into anything else I would try to bring it under the Mongoose Studios brand in some way that made sense.

One Hour

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Wed, 05 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

1. I want to do things, but I run out of motivation

It’s time to tackle this head-on. I’ve mentioned some of this before, I’ve talked about it on stream, I’ve told people individually. Now it’s time to write it down.

Imagine that it’s Monday. It’s been a long day, you worked, ran errands, whatever. Now you could sit down and work on whatever thing you want to do or learn, but you’re tired. Yesterday you did it, and it was a great time. But yesterday you had the magic sauce. Yesterday, for some reason, you had motivation. Tonight, you don’t have that. It’s probably ok if you just play some video games, drink a beer or two, watch TV, take the night off. You can work on that thing again when you feel like it.

We Need to Talk About Brainrot

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

0. Housekeeping

Before we begin I just wanted to drop a little note here to let you all know that I’m going to be switching to a once monthly blog post schedule. Taking a little extra time on this one and letting myself not only breathe but polish my thoughts a little bit more has made me realize I was pushing way too hard and spending too much time trying to catch up on writing/editing these.

Disappointed

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A lot has happened in the past couple of days, and it didn’t feel right to post what I had prepared as a result.

I am not a political person. I do not choose to engage in politics.

I can find agreement and strong disagreement with various positions and core ideals of “both sides.”

I say this because I want you to understand where I am coming from, or more specifically where I am not coming from.

Culture

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

1. Culture

Businesses make a huge deal about their culture. They want you to read their culture page (spoiler, it looks the same as every other one) and they list “great culture” as a benefit on their careers page.

It’s all a lie. Because culture is NOT what you say it is. Culture is what you do every single day. No amount of platitudes will change that. In fact some of the places I have worked that had the WORST culture were the most vocal about the imaginary one.

Tutorials Are Fucking Hard

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

0. Before We Begin

If you want to see the tutorial that this post is about you can find the playlist here.

1. A Quick Tutorial

I had a fun little idea. Why not create a basic Go HTTP server tutorial? It’s pretty easy code to write in Go, and something that has utility. I had never made a tutorial like that before, only internal documentation. But how much harder could it be?

Write Shit Down

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

1. Go-Go Gadget

The world demands a certain amount of organization. When you can’t juggle all your commitments, people notice. It’s me. I’m people. Broken promises are one of my pet peeves, when someone says they will follow up on something and never does, I lose a degree of respect for that person. Thus, in my pursuit of not being a hypocritical douche canoe, I work really hard on trying to NOT be that guy.

Confessions of a Bad Writer

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 01:00:00 -0600

1. Blogger? I hardly even know ’er

I’m bad at writing. I’m even worse at blogging. Nothing you can say will change my mind on that. When I sit down to write these posts I just word-vomit my thoughts onto the page with some hastily scrawled bullet points from a notepad as a loose guide. If you’re about to mentally tell me that I could get better with practice, well you’re probably right. But the other confession I have is that I don’t particularly enjoy writing.

The only rules that really matter are these

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 01:00:00 -0600

1. Savvy?

The first Pirates of the Caribbean movie may well be peak Disney. It’s smart in the right places, silly in the right places, and Johnny Depp’s portrayal of a slightly unhinged and perpetually drunken pirate is absolutely brilliant for the tone of the movie. But in all that amusement there lies a quote that has stuck with me for the past 22 (yikes) years. “The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do.”

LinkedOut

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 00:00:00 -0600

1. I Was There, Gandalf

Social media and I go back to the Myspace days. I don’t mean the sad corporate version it became after it was sold. I mean Myspace in all its early 2000s glory. Every page played music and most of them looked like someone was hosting a rave. “My Top 8” and who got added/removed or had their rank change was a new kind of gossip.

It is Possible to Commit no Mistakes and Still Lose

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 -0600

1. Star Trek

I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was one of those rare things that I could convince my parents to allow me to stay up to the very edge of my bedtime for. Like any young nerd in training I was there for the cool spaceships, the android, the aliens. The normal science fiction things that, I suspect, initially draw most of us to the genre. There were a lot of things that I didn’t appreciate back then, and not only because due to the vagaries of broadcast television and the episodic nature of the show making it hard to even conceive of, much less piece together, a grander story arc in my young brain.

Hello, World!

contact@mongoose-studios.com (Mongoose Studios) — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:16:01 -0600

Famous first words, and important ones too. The traditional message to indicate that you have correctly configured your environment and can proceed with the project that currently has your attention.

How apropos, then, that this post exists to aid me in ensuring that all the machinery is in place and I can begin this particular endeavor.