This post inspired by this Substack post by Mike Cernovich.

There is a powerful idea that you may or may not have heard of called the “Skill Stack.”

I first heard the term from Scott Adams’ book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” The idea is that you don’t have to be the best in the world at one skill to be successful. You should stack skills together so that you are the best in the world (or at least near the top) at the combination of skills.

Your New Year’s resolution should be to learn a new skill and add it to your stack.

Things You Should Be Good At

There is a list of things that nearly everyone will benefit from:

• Energy Management
• Sales
• Risk Evaluation
• Communication
• Persistence
• Building Skills
• Prioritizing

Think of these as a foundation to build your other skills off of.

Find a Skill that Will Take You Towards Your Desired Future

Ideally you have some vision of the life you want to live.

Maybe it is a dream job. Or something you want to do everyday. Maybe it is a great work you have created (book, movie, game, app, etc).

Figure out what skills the future you who is doing that or has created that would have, then pick one and learn it this year.

Then stack those skills until you are the person that can get to your vision.

My Skill for 2023

Personally, I am going to try to become a better artist.

Specifically digital art. I have made a handful of game prototypes and am enjoying designing and building games. But my self created game art still looks pretty bland. And while many games have been successful with very basic art, good art does enhance the experience.

So look out for art progress posts this year.

Keep getting wiser, stronger, and better.

Sometimes you find something cool by accident.

This morning I stumbled across an interesting open source multiplayer server for Node JS called Colyseus. And I say stumbled because I wasn’t looking for something like this at all. I was researching a different problem entirely and it caught my eye.

Online multiplayer is a problem I have looked into before and this looks like a nice prepackaged solution.

How It Works

Colyseus is built on the idea that multiplayer games need an authoritative server.

All a game client should do, for a multiplayer game, is report the player input to the server and render the game state provided from the server back to the player. This can be a bit tricky over the internet with latency. Players can get frustrated because their input does not match what they expect from the games reaction.

Colyseus uses websockets and presents a set of lifecycle methods to plug your logic in and get started. It connects players to “rooms” that are game instances in memory. The players then interact with the room until the game is over at which point you can throw away the game state or store it in a database for later.

I will definitely be checking this out for some of my upcoming projects.

Learn More

You can learn more about this project by reading it’s documentation and checking out the source code.