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Pretty Good Hat

Tag: destiny

A screenshot from Destiny 2 showing several player characters at the edge of a platform. It depicts the final scene after victory over Oryx in the Kings Fall raid. A player is emoting sitting in a luxurious chair swirling a wine glass.

I’m really happy to have found a group to more regularly run raids – fun and challenging endgame content – in Destiny 2. It’s particularly special because my kiddo is big enough now to regularly run with us and this group of friends is generous and welcoming to them. Last night we completed Kings Fall together, and this raid is a real nostalgia trip in D2, in addition to being a lot of fun. It was kiddo’s first completion of this one, so a memorable one for both us.

The launch of the new Destiny 2 expansion, Nightfall, adds a new subclass – Strand – and restructures the mod system that affects player stats gained from armor. I’m happy to report that it only took me a couple of hours to revise my Shiny tool to find optimal armor loadouts using the new mods and subclass fragments! I had to hunt a little through some old code, and next time it should be a simple and easy update due to having fixed how I work with the manifest.

An animated gif showing a set of growing bars measuring Destiny 2 weapon usage

I’ve had a really nice hobby R coding weekend, learning to use {gganimate} to make plots like this. I’ve been re-tooling all my old piles of fish scripts that I’ve used to gather my Destiny data from the game’s API. Now I have a useful pair of quarto notebooks that retrieve data using parallel processing and produce this kind of output. I’m super enthused by what I’ve learned!

Had a pretty good hobby coding weekend learning how to use purrr::pluck() to get specific nested fields from piles of json data rather than blowing out the whole series of nested lists.

Two windows from the RStudio profvis tool, showing the times of several procesess. The second window shows the same process being completed dramatically more quickly than the first.

I used the RStudio tool profvis this weekend to find speed improvement opportunities in Armorer. I suspected that I could rewrite a big operation that calculates the maximum of many columns across several thousand rows. Holy smokes: Using matrixStats::rowMaxs cuts processing time by an amazing amount!

Screenshot of a web application showing two items selected from a form field. They are circled in bright purple marker with an arrow pointing to them to draw the eye.

I finished a big update to Armorer this week, to enable inclusion of subclass fragments in stat calculations. I learned a ton with this release and laid good groundwork for additional mod management. I’m pretty pleased!

Super-pleased to see that a couple of small Shiny app improvements I made this weekend correctly picked up on some source data changes today and automatically handled them. Pretty cool!

🎮 I got to spend a few hours this weekend laying siege to the new dungeon that was released in Destiny 2 on Friday. Today, my team and I finished it! It’s the first time I’ve been able to play new, hard content at release and without any prior knowledge of it – and to actually complete it! I’m really happy that I got to do it, and I really enjoyed the time with my team to figure it all out together and successfully make our way through it.