My notes from when I had this problem are a bit spotty, so there might be gaps in my information, but I think the solution I ended up using is pretty clear.

The Problem

One of the things Vagrant does is syncs everything in your project folder to /vagrant on the VM. For some reason this was not working for me when using the ubuntu/xenial64 image. My final solution ended up not needing this, but at this point I did need it and either way it was weird that it wasn’t working.

I was also getting this error during the start of my vagrant up:

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My first requirement was that I could test all of my work locally using Vagrant before pushing any work to Digital Ocean. Knowing that anything I did locally would then be pushed to Digital Ocean, I decided to start by ensuring that my basic starting provisioning scripts would work locally and remotely before starting to tackle the actual project goals.

A note: I develop on a Linux desktop and a Macbook Pro. Everything I do works on both, but all of my investigative work was done on Linux so the installation of software like Virtualbox and Vagrant and the Hashicorp packages will be slightly different for Mac OS.

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Blogging About My Server

I recently finished rebuilding the server that this website and some of my projects run on, and now I’m going to write blog posts about what I did and how. Also why. The main goal of this project was to end up with a web server I was happy with, but I also decided to take copious notes on what I was doing and how I did it with the intention of writing blog posts about it when I was done.

My plan for these posts isn’t just to show off the final project and go “tadaaaa!” but to detail each problem I faced and how I solved it, even if I ultimately scrapped that approach. Just because I didn’t like the solution doesn’t mean someone else won’t find the information useful for whatever they’re doing.

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Current status of my current relevant work:

• Helm108, the webserver, now runs off my own code instead of dokku. It took ages but it works and that’s awesome.
• I’ve got my head around the basics of VueJS and Firebase and can now build basic apps in a short amount of time. This makes me happy. I’ve made:
  • The scaffolding for a crazy idea for a multiplayer lobby thing that you could use to build any kind of multi-user game/app with instancing and joining and spectating. I then realised this was a crazy thing to build for my first Vue app and stopped, but it taught me a lot.

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We Released Iomante

On the 2nd of June 2016 we shared Iomante on /r/funny to a tune of about ten upvotes. Which seems disappointing, until we look at how many people actually played each chapter!

Google Analytics

As mentioned previously I added a lot of analytics to chapters one and two. Custom events will tell us how many people looked at the pages, how many people decided to play the game, and how many people actually finished the game. Each chapter was treated as a separate entity, so the analytics are split over both chapters. Sadly I’m not sure I can actually see how many people started from chapter one and finished chapter two, but as the link we shared went directly to chapter one and the end of chapter one links to chapter two we can safely assume that anyone playing chapter two got there from chapter one.

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With the launch of helm108 I’ve been diving back into the world of webops a fair bit, and I’ve been learning quite a lot as I go. I tend to have a few maintenance tasks I need to do, and some evenings or weekends usually get dedicated to solve these tasks.

I host a couple of wordpress sites for my parents and some of their friends, and I’ve been in the process of migrating them from shared hosting to a box on Digital Ocean. I’d never done this before and I was going to have to do it for five different sites, so as I realised the process wasn’t that simple I started noting down exactly what I had to do.

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Feedback on Iomante

So people have now played chapter 2, and overall the feedback been very positive. People actually laughed at our jokes! It’s a good feeling.

We released chapter two of Iomante on the 21st of May, and re-released chapter one in the process as anyone that played it when we first published it would have forgotten about it by now. Chapter 1 lived on trrrm.com until I took that down, so it was moved to helm108 at the same time that chapter 2 was released. We decided to share Iomante on Facebook first to see what sort of feedback we might get, and new friends since 2013 meant fresh eyes on our work that did result in some useful responses.

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We finally finished chapter two of Iomante! It is a browser game that works on mobile and everything else. Click here to go and play it: Iomante! Continue reading to learn more about it.

We being myself and my friend John. In 2013 I sat down to do some coding and wrote a tiny engine for playing a very simple choose your own adventure style game. I then thought “well I should write a story for it now I guess” and messaged John, a man that writes fiction for fun and, occasionally, profit, and asked if he wanted to meet up and write something together.

He did, so we did, and after six hours of work we had a story that took, if you went the long way through, about three minutes to finish.

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New website! My website used to be trrrm.com but I got fed up with having to tell people how to spell it, so here we are. Helm108 was picked because for whatever reason this scene from The Fifth Element got itself stuck in my head and occasionally surfaces itself for various reasons, and I thought it would be a good name to operate under.

I’d been working on this site for a while, but finishing Iomante and wanting to publish it as soon as possible meant I had to get on with helm108, so that gave me some drive to actually get it up and running. It turns out that actually finishing things feels amazing!

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On August 6th 2012, a Monday, I woke up at half past four in the morning so that I could watch the livestream of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover landing. The Curiosity landing was special because it was the first time they were using their skycrane delivery mechanism. This video describes the whole process of landing Curiosity on Mars:

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