Tim van Leuverden,

When I wanted to play some games with my friends, often the question of “what game should we play” would come up. I found a site that would randomly give you a game (WhatShouldIPlayOnSteam.com) but only for one user. So we would start asking each other “do you have X” or “feel like playing some X” for half an hour, trying to find a good game to play. So I decided to make a site that would do just that, find a game we should play.

The site consists of two parts, a VueJS front-end and a NodeJS back-end which communicates to the Steam APIs. However, even during initial development I found out that the Steam API’s were quite slow, with response time upward of a second. So I had to add some form of caching, I did that using Redis.

After adding the first layer of caching, I also added another layer of caching for the finding of games everybody has.

So it now caches player ID lookup by “vanity URL”, player game list, and multiple player common game lists. Luckily Redis provides an easy solution that kills cache entries after a while, so I didn’t need to worry about the server using too much memory.

In 2014 I started the HBO (Dutch acronym for “Higher Workforce Education”, it’s college) ICT (“Information Computer Technologies”) study, the “Game Development” speciality. Initially I thought it would be fun to learn about IT using games. But after my first year I figured out that it was a standard IT study, with a Game Development sticker. Every time it got interesting, there would be a “you don’t have to know about that”.

So in 2016 I decided to switch to the “Software Engineering” speciality. With the hope that it would go a bit more into detail on the technical components, they did not.