code_Whisperer

Anybody else seeing GoDaddy DNS issues as of about 4 minutes ago? Or just my clients?

Weird. Someone has created an account with one of the major money-sending apps using a fake email on a domain name I own. I can see this because I receive the emails sent by the app vendor via the domain's catchall account. So whenever this person tries to login or change their password, I see the confirmation emails sent by the app vendor.

To be fair, it could have been an innocent mistake on the part of the person who signed up... maybe they meant to type .net instead of .com or something like that.

I contacted the vendor to tell them that the account is not authorized or known on my domain, and asked them to cancel, but they will not unless I send them an email using the 'from' address of the unauthorized account.

So, questions:

1) Is this a common thing? And if this is potentially illicit activity, what is this person thinking or hoping they'll be able to commit?

2) Even though I'd be using my own domain, should I intentionally impersonate someone who may (or may not) be attempting inappropriate activity in order to get the account removed? Wouldn't that - on its own - be a potentially dangerous or illegal act?

{sigh} modern problems.

Background: Over the last year I've burned through several online courses learning how to convert my first game to Unity. The first version was in a Lua game dev solution that was pretty cool, but I wanted to switch to something that had more. More support, more plugins, more assets, more extensibility, etc.

I've learned a lot of lessons since then, including a pretty powerful one over the last couple of weeks.

On to a new path now. My focus is on hypercasual and simple, mostly 2-D games. So now I'm looking at Godot and Defold. Godot looks great, and has a lot of info (tutorials, commercial courses, assets, etc.), but I probably won't be doing 3-D any time soon. But when I looked at Defold, a couple of things caught my eye, and ONE THING in particular has piqued my interest as a small dev-shop. That one thing was contained in these two statements:

"Zero-config cloud build for native code"

followed by:

"No need for Xcode or Android Studio for mobile deployment!"

So wait a sec. I don't have to futz around anymore with XCode? For me that is the single biggest selling point in the entire feature list.

Now I am curious. Before I commit to switching, does anyone know if there are other capable game engines/frameworks that allow building for multiple targets (including iOS and Android) that don't require me to use Xcode, Android Studio, and multiple machines?

Because for my own small shop and dev flow, that would be a game changer.

Looking for advice. I've been doing dev for decades, which makes me an old. Much of the contract biz out there is no longer using the languages or environments in which I am highly proficient, so it's time to either retire or make a change. And it ain't gonna be that first one. I figure that at my age, I have maybe one big language change left in me, so I want to get it right. My field is web dev, and it's where I fit best. I have no intention of going to work as an employee anywhere, so corporate acceptance/usage is not part of the formula. Most of my dev experience has been deeply Microsoft based.

So, for the purposes of web application development and my own SaaS development projects, where do you (based on your own experience) recommend I look?

I am thinking perhaps Go with a good web framework, or maybe Python with something like Django, for awhile was thinking Ruby/Rails but that scene seems to be waning (or maybe not?) but am seeking feedback.

Goals:

    - Reasonably easy to learn and get started

    - framework needs to have decent security baked-in

    - should run easily on lower cost server environments (think Linux not Windows - but might be nice if it is able to run on either)

    - good database interfacing/support

    - must be fast/efficient and scale well

Side note: I do love C# as a language, but have grown weary of the server expense and also the seemingly endless tiny technical problems that require - what feels like - Stack-Overflowing and then tinkering and then tweaking on the server to 'fix'. I am looking for languages and environments that generally "just work."

No flame wars, no evangelism. OK, go.