In-Progress Updates
Today’s post is going to be a lot smaller since I’ve got some family plans for St. Patty’s Day (cornbeef and Guinness, yum!) and haven’t had as much time to work on projects this past week. So, I’m just going to highlight some projects that are in progress besides the Tetris NES game!
FrogRunner
I’ll be honest, I’ve gotten very tired of trying to get the springy-rope physics to work, so I’ve briefly switched focus to keeping my Blender skills fresh. I opened up Blender and quickly started work on a model for the frog here:
The reference art was actually made by my brother. I like it, though the lines in the picture often overlap with the gridlines in Blender, and that’s been a bit tricky. To make sure I don’t burn out on this project, I’ll be focusing more on sound design and graphics for the time being.
JavaScript
Oddly enough, JavaScript and web-dev were something we weirdly skipped over in college. I took one class where (despite being advertised as a beginner’s course) we had to do 20+ hours of LinkedIn courses to learn JS, HTML, and CSS so that we could even do the first homework. For homework 2, I think the class spent an average of 12 hours on it. I was an officer of a club, biking 5 miles a day to and from campus, working 2 jobs, and doing 4 other tough classes… I dropped that class after nearly 2 months.
That was the first and last time I was able to do web-dev in college. Keep in mind that I was a transfer student, so I had only been learning coding for about a year at that point. Our college required us to have an Associate’s degree in engineering, not computer science… I still think that was a really strange choice.
Anyways, all that to say I’ve been practicing on and off with JavaScript, working my way through the Eloquent JS book by Marijn Haverbeke and doing all the exercises. Last I checked, I was working through chapter 4 and data structures. But… It’s been a few weeks since then, so I’ll probably have to skim some of the chapters to get the rust off. Here’s an image of my coding environment:
Honestly, what really surprises me about JS so far is how much it treats functions like values. In so many other languages, you’re taught that “code is comprised of values and functions that modify those values”, but that doesn’t really exist here. Closures are also crazy interesting, and having to train my brain to think of functions as containing their own ‘environment’ is an interesting exercise.
My hope is to have a simple REST API project done within a month or so. I feel like that’d be a great start!
Final Thoughts
Some weeks, you just can’t get as much done. Stuff slips through your fingers, you forget things, or you’re just a lot more tired than you normally are. What fitness has been teaching me is that when days like that come, you just have to accept it. Honestly, accepting and letting go are two lessons I really need to get better at. I’m a very controlling person, and like having all my ducks in a row.
Having weeks like this, where I didn’t make much project progress, and have been feeling a lot more tired and depressed than normal, is important. You can’t operate on the assumption you’ll be feeling 100% all the time, even if there’s no good reason for you to feel otherwise. We’re humans, not machines. Sometimes, all you can do is get the rest/reset you need, then go back and try to be better!
Reading the Dragon Ball manga has been a really nice reminder about this. Every time that kid Goku gets his butt handed to him, he sees it as an opportunity to get better. There’s no hubris or ego involved, just understanding and optimism. I get really in my head sometimes, and this story has been great at dealing with that.
Plus, you get to see really cute drawings like this one (RIP Toriyama!)
Oh, I also rewatched The Neverending Story last night. There’s really something about watching your namesake with family that helps get your spirits up. Until next time, stay hopeful!
“Only the right name gives beings and things their reality. A wrong name makes everything unreal. That’s what lies do.” Michael Ende