Today marks the day that I pull the plug on the GCP instance that has been the host of this blog for about 3.5 years. The reason why is simple - GCP made changes in how billing of external IP addresses works, meaning I wouldn’t be able to uphold one of the core principles behind this website - that everything runs in a free tier.

As a natural next step to publishing a Steam Web API library to Maven Central, I have now implemented login with Steam OpenID to play.kilumanga.com. At the time of writing this, it’s basically a POC of the authentication/validation flow, where the end result is a view that shows your Steam ID.

As anyone doing any serious work with Java will be able to tell you, Maven, the software project management tool is not perfect. It is, however, extremely useful and seriously powerful. In a nutshell, it is a tool that lets you easily use 3rd-party libraries in your project while simplifying the build cycle with easily configured plugins that do things like execute unit tests, write metadata for, and package dependencies into one single, final (runnable JAR/WAR) artifact.