I really enjoy the videos players post here. There is a lot of talent here and getting videos on Youtube can't help but increase the discoverability of the game.
I have noticed however that is is more rare for players to post their AHF files. And when they do, this forum is not the ideal format for finding them, searching attachments, etc. It can be done somewhat, but mostly you have to have seen it before the post scrolls off the front page or it's forgotten.
Edited video is great, but raw AHF has a lot of value too. You can really learn a lot from having the AHF and being able to play and replay and watch from different angles and positions. I feel there is a lot of lost gold on peoples hard drives that isn't being shared effectively with the community.
I'm at a weird point in my career where I am needing to retool my skill-set for future opportunities. My current skill-set was prime 11 years ago, but I made the mistake of staying at one company too long and getting stuck on one product. Now I am getting geared up on a new upcoming tech stack that I am excited to learn Microsoft Blazor. It is a responsive web client technology similar to things like Angular and React except....you know, in a real language.
I have been trying to pick a demo project in this new tech for a resume portfolio. Employers are more impressed if you can show them an example of what you can do instead of just reading your resume. It's a better way to learn too. You can only read for so long, but to really learn something you need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. I've had a hard time picking an interesting project. It has to be constrained enough that it is feasible for me to do by myself, but interesting enough that it will really show off my coad Kung Fu. Most of the suggestions I've seen are derivative or boring. I refuse to burden the world with yet another uninspired To-Do List app.
I started thinking of project that seemed interesting and as a side benefit might provide some value to this community. I was thinking of building a AHF film archive website. Players would create an account and they can upload their AHF files. Each file is given an description, thumbnail image, and tagged with various keywords to make the archive structured and searchable through a query interface.
So you might login and see a list of the most recently uploaded films, but go to the search and look for film newer than 6 months that involve bomber intercepts so you can study some technique. You can read through the description and view the thumbnails and find one that looks interesting and click to download it.
Or you might just query all of Floob's films to study his mad moves. etc.
I'd take uploaded film and compress it and place it in Azure blob storage. I think that is cheap enough that I could provide a couple of gig compressed storage to each account. That should be a lot of film. 2gb compressed storage should hold like 3.5-4gb raw film. Some limit is probably good to encourage people to curate their archive and only put up the good stuff.
This would all be provided by me free of charge to this community. It would be a great learning project and a useful resume portfolio example.
It would allow me to demonstrate a full stack of skills from web client UI, to account management/site security, to database manipulation, to cloud services. What would make it really valuable is if it is a living project that people are using daily and getting value out of. That would make it more impressive to potential employers.
Is this the kind of thing anyone would be interested in using? Would you guys find any value in this? Am I totally in the weeds here? Would it just get ignored?
Thanks for your feedback.
