2019 has been an interesting year for Iron Arachne. It saw a major rewrite of the heraldry generator, a TON of updates to the culture and climate generators, and a lot of fleshing out of details. Since the world repository was created in April of this year, it's seen just under 97,000 lines of code added, 61,000 lines of code deleted, and about 250 commits. Four people other than myself contributed code during Hacktoberfest.

The biggest milestone for the site this year was the incorporation of the heraldry generator into Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator, which significantly boosted traffic to the site. Having such a big injection of traffic exposed several problems with the site that I've been steadily working to fix. Some of these problems are trickier than others, such as a memory leak that I have yet to track down.

2020 is going to see some major changes to Iron Arachne. I'm working on adding user accounts to the site so that people can save results permanently. At the moment, the only saving that happens is the writing of image files and the caching of data. That data cache is wiped out every time I need to restart the server hosting the site.

I'm also going to rewrite the front end website in Crystal. I'm curious about Crystal and excited about the advantages it would bring over PHP. A new design for the site is also in the works. That should launch sometime in the middle of the year next year, unless something changes.

That's it for now. See you in the new decade!