The latest addition to play.kilumanga.com is a view of currently active Borderlands 2 SHiFT keys. For those of you who have neither played a Borderlands game nor know what a SHiFT key is: basically, it’s a key (code) that you can use in a game to get a number of in-game (golden) keys, which in turn allow you to collect pretty good in-game items.

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.

I have a passion for problem solving that almost parallels my desire to engineer software to solve those problems for me. Thus, today, I would like to talk about my efforts of learning how to solve a Rubik’s cube and engineering software to solve it for me.

These days, I’ve been trying my hand at some of the games in my constantly growing collection on Steam. One of those games, is BIT.TRIP RUNNER.