Like most developers, I have lots of side projects, but there's one in particular that always lures me back in from time to time. This project is an attempt to revive a genre of games that was very popular in the early 2000s called PBBG (Persistent Browser Based Game). If you are not familiar with this kind of game, a PBBG is essentially a game that satisfies the following two criteria:

Recently I had to deal with a really pesky problem during the development of a client's product related to how unicode strings work. During the development of a new feature, we had the need to summarize some long-form text from the database. Because this text was migrated over by a third-party company, we had no knowledge of how it was previously stored and handled during the migration. The only thing we knew was that the original text could contain HTML markup from a rich text WISYWIG editor.

It's not uncommon to have the need of doing a series of database operations where one depends on the result of another. For those cases, we usually resort to transactions, which allow us to have more control over how we want to persist our data in a single consistent unit of work.