Challenges & Learnings

Middle Earth: Prompting and narrating like Tolkien from raw GIS data

Turning cold geospatial facts into a daily chapter in Tolkien's voice, by splitting the work between rule-based hints, a strictly staged prompt, and an LLM on a short leash.

Middle Earth: Giving life to the map (entities and encounters)

Building a 507-creature bestiary and a pure, seedable encounter engine that decides who you meet on the road, grounded in region, time of day, and terrain.

Middle Earth: Getting directions (without passing through Mordor)

A hand-written Dijkstra in plain JavaScript that routes across 4,119 road segments, weighting every step by biome, altitude, road type, and mode of transport.

Middle Earth: How to create a Climate System from nothing

In which I refuse to invent weather, and instead steal a whole year of it from 1950, matching every region of Middle-earth to a real European climate twin.

Middle Earth: Creating the DEM System (peaks everywhere!)

How I turned a flat fantasy drawing into terrain you can climb, sweat over, and occasionally curse at, using elevation points, altitude layers, and a PostGIS raster.

Hasen: Why REST Wasn't Enough and WebSockets Changed Everything

Why REST wasn't enough for real-time multiplayer and how WebSockets changed everything

Hasen: Why I Built a Domain Layer Before Writing a Single Component

Building an agnostic domain layer for a real-time multiplayer card game

Responsible AI Use Under Pressure: What I Learned Working with Deadlines in 2025

October 20, 2025

How to use AI responsibly under tight deadlines without letting it become a crutch