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Wizard of Birds
Young friends in a war-torn nation receive an urgent letter from their erstwhile schoolmate whose mother has vanished. When they arrive, they find their friend has also disappeared into an abandoned tower in the woods, inhabited by nothing but birds. Do you like D&D adventures? How about Studio Ghibli movies? You might like this. For…
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Warrior’s Tea
I went on a trip to hang out with my co-workers this February and ran a one-shot D&D game for them. Having just read the fabulous Six of Crows I was in the mood for a heist. Coincidentally, just a few weeks later, Wizards was going to release a whole book on the topic but…
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Good coding practices
I recently had to give a talk on “Good coding practices” for some new developers at Automattic. At first I had no idea how to summarize such a vast and dynamic topic, but as I was working on a plan I started to see some ideas come up over and over again and I decided…
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Writing a diff/PR description to get better reviews
During a recent work meetup, we had an impromptu exercise where we went over what makes a GitHub PR description most useful to the people reviewing it, particularly when not everyone is working on the same part of the codebase. Better descriptions make for faster reviews! This is my attempt to turn that discussion into…
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Valley of the Machines
I wrote this one-shot D&D adventure to share with my co-workers on a recent work meetup; it was the first in several years! I now share it with you all. It takes about 3 hours from start to finish and requires very little experience on the part of the players. For the DM, the adventure…
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Common TypeScript errors and how to fix them
At work we recently changed the builds for our project to fail when new TypeScript errors are added, so I took some time to clean up a bunch of old TS errors in our codebase, some of which have been there for over 5 years. There were close to 600 errors when I started (down…
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The Hunted Queen
As in the before times, this year I wrote a D&D one-shot adventure to share with my co-workers at Automattic. Sadly, I was only able to run the adventure for a few people because 2020. Still, it was a fun adventure and I wanted to share it with the internet, so here you go. (It’s…
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grepdef: a quick way to search for definitions in code
I live inside my code editor all day and something that I need to do pretty often is to search for the definition of a symbol (a variable, constant, or function). For example, I might be debugging a problem in a JavaScript file when I come across this code: I need to see translateDataFromRaw to…
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Unusual Things
Every year I write a D&D one-shot game for my friends and co-workers at the Automattic Grand Meetup. This year’s adventure was titled “Unusual Things” and has a certain… upside down feeling to it. I hope you like it! Here’s the blurb: Nothing much happens in the mountaintop town of Hawkurns, where the populace mines…
Payton.Codes 