Tour Docs Roadmap About

About The Person

I’m Zechen Montgomery Michael Jean-Silas Nicodemus Asherton Moor, AKA @TheOtherZech. Yes, that is my actual name. No, you aren’t pronouncing it correctly. Yes, the IRS hates me.

I am, technically speaking, a technical artist. I make art pipelines go brrr, which is a polite way of saying that I spend my time writing ugly spaghetti scripts and yelling at people who don’t use them properly.

When I am not doing the above, I retreat to the mountains and deliberately ignore your emails. Leave me alone. I’m trying to go feral.

Why?

Because I’m sick of people using ad hoc systems for managing complex entity data collections, breaking those systems, and then falling back on solutions that don’t mesh well with version control.

Every vaguely independent studio ends up trying to roll their own solution in this domain, and the solutions they end up with are rarely built in a way that can handle scope changes and spec drift.

The tooling they implement around these solutions is rarely capable of handling anything close to a migration or mass refactor, and it inevitably devolves into brittle heap of monkey-patches and edge-cases that defies all common sense.

Yes, Blizzard, I’m talking about you.

How?

Look, I don’t know how I learned programming. It started with just a teeny smidgen of Python for automating some common DCC tasks, and then suddenly I was working in C and learning Rust on the side.

And for the web development side of things, the only thing I intentionally learned was how to make a dead-basic blog using Ghost back in 2015. The rest of it has been non-consensual. Please ignore the number of full stack projects I’ve shipped.

Where?

Directly in the center of Berkeley Pit.

About the Language

VADA’s canonical implementation is written in Rust and leverages a bunch of crates created by smart people who write good code (many of which are used by Rust-Analyzer).

Blame them for the good parts of the canonical implementation. Blame me for the bad ones.

  • Lexer: Logos
  • Parser: Rowan
  • Incremental Compute Framework: Salsa

Can I Contribute to It?

This project needs some polishing before its opened up for multiplayer.

Yes, it’s a serious project that I intend to ship. Yes, there is a long-term plan for managing it as a “proper” open source project. No, I am not organized enough to manage all of that while I’m in the bootstrap-y experimental phase.

We’ll get there.

Can I Financially Support It?

If you throw money at VADA right now, I’m going to spend it on frivolous things like food and rent.

Boring Questions People Ask For Some Reason

These answers are here, in the ass end of the about page, because the answers are genuinely irrelevant. Please stop asking them.

How do I Pronounce Vada?

  • The most-correct pronunciation is goʊ fʌk jərˈsɛlf.
  • If you can’t pull that off, shoot for two syllables and play the rest by ear.

What does Vada mean?

  • It’s Food. Delicious food. It is the ideal food to bring me as a peace offering. Bring me savory doughnuts.

Can I be an alpha tester?

  • Maybe. Eventually. But only if you’re in a position to onboard yourself.

Will you help me integrate Vada into my project so I can be an alpha tester?

  • If you’re an indie dev who has never shipped a financially successful project, Vada won’t help you get a game out the door. It’s an experimental language. Learning Vada won’t remove your roadblocks. Talk less ship more.
    • Also, I don’t like you enough as a person to help you.
      • I haven’t even met you.
      • Please stop asking for general game development help.

Why did you [insert decision here]?

  • Because brain juice is a non-renewable resource and I try to operate on as few brain cells as possible in order to preserve my limited supply.
  • Because Vada is still in its the experimental phase and [insert decision here] was the first thing that came to mind while working on [insert feature here].
  • Because I hate you.

When will Vada support be added to Unity/​Unreal/​Blender/​Pornhub/​Excel/​FastAPI/​Kubernetes/​CS:GO/​Eurotruck Simulator/​GameMaker/​VROID/My Tax Returns/​Vercel/​Dragonfly/​CryEngine/​Skyrim/​SQLite/​Etc?

  • Look, I’m not in a position to wag the dog like that. I won’t even dream of application-specific integrations before I’ve shipped the Rust crate, and that won’t happen in [current year].

Please don’t make me add more questions.

About The Website

Look, I am in no sense a “proper” web developer. This website is a pile of jank slapped together without a coherent plan. You don’t want to abuse this tech stack the way I’m abusing this tech stack.

How mdsvex setup work?

I’m abusing Vite to bulk-import the svelte components that mdsvex generates in order to aggregate markdown files into single-page collections. It’s hacky, it requires layout-like stub pages for each collection (which means duplicate code), and it isn’t set up to recurse through sub-directories.

Cookies and Privacy Stuff

TL;DR: I don’t like web development enough to spend time implementing analytics. This is a documentation site for a project that hasn’t shipped an alpha yet. I don’t have enough braincells to figure out GDPR compliance, nor let alone do meaningful things with the data I’m not collecting.

About the About Page

Bruh.

🄯 Please Steal These Docs 🄯
Privacy Policy About Github