Hello anyone! Back and blogging. Normal(ish) again and determined to stay on topic. Or near topic- a couple degrees from topic really. Today I’m going to tell you about all the projects I’m excited about that aren’t game dev. I don’t really have time to do any of these, but I’m going to try to squeeze them in when I can anyway.
One of my favorite blogs- “Where’s Your Ed At” by Ed Zitron – opens every post with a “soundtrack”. Basically a song suggestion that compliments the blog topic. I doubt I’m going to do this every week, but today’s blog has a soundtrack: “The Car Song” by The Cat Empire.* Let’s dive into it- here are some of the project on my back burner.
1. Become a Linux Dude
I’ve wanted to switch over my main OS for a while now. Partly this is because Windows 11 seems to be accreting more dark patterns with every update, but mostly it’s because as I dive deeper into the world of programing I’m increasingly in awe of open source software. This kind of free sharing of ideas is rare in other industries- but it seems to be the default in software development, or at least as common as proprietary software. Which is super neat. It seems to fly in the face of the ruthless capitalism we accept as the norm (though I’m aware a lot of open source projects are are backed by major corporations which would only do so if it made more money than keeping the software proprietary, but even this fact solidifies the idea that free ideas boost productivity.) The best parallel I can think of is in the Table Top RPG industry where lots of stuff is published under an Open Game License or Creative Commons License with the intent that others modify and even publish derivative works commercially. That’s super cool.
So yha. I want to see how much of my workflow I can move to open source products. The first step of this is my operating system. I’ve already downloaded an played around with some popular Linux distros. For my first go I’ve decided to keep it simple with Ubuntu. I’ve got a second NVMe drive so I can setup my PC to dual boot (I’ll still need my Windows setup to test builds etc.) I’m all set, really just need to find the time to do it.
2. Git Good
This dovetails nicely with the open-source stuff above- I want to contribute to a Git repo, somewhere for something at some point. And I’m not sure I’ll feel like a developer until I do. For a good while the only software content management (SCM) system I was familiar with was Unity’s Plastic SCM. It’s got a pretty decent GUI and got me comfortable with ideas like branching and merging (and we plan to keep using it with our current Unity projects), but it’s pretty clear that the out-front winner of the SCM game is Git.
I’ve spent some time in the last month working through Git for beginners. I’ve steered clear of the Git for desktop GUI (which I imagine feels similar to Plastic) and I’m learning the command line from my VS code terminal because it makes me feel like a hacker. I’ve got my GitHub account (ironically a Microsoft product- but what am I going to do about it) and I’m getting comfortable with cloning and poking around in other people’s repos. Eventually I’m going to commit something useful, maybe a basket of Unity Tools I’ve been building (if I ever get them documented), or maybe contribute to an Obsidian plugin- or write one of my own (just learn TypeScript first.) Or something- anything really. Point is, I’m going to feel like an imposter until I contribute something to the great sea of code– and probably will continue to feel like an imposter after that because everyone, everywhere, doing everything is really just winging it anyway.
3. Rust Curious
Help! I think I want to learn Rust despite the fact that It will take a lot of time and I don’t really have a good use case for it. Why? I’m blaming Unity’s ECS. Did a little test project to get to grips with ECS and it was a bit of a brain melter. I’m an Object-oriented fellow, and I live in an object oriented world (probably- I’m not a physicist). So getting my head around data-oriented design is going to be a tricky ask. I do see the need for it- had a comp-sci professor for a data structures class a decade (or more) ago that was all in on parallel processing. He was not a fan of object oriented programing for reasons that weren’t clear to me a the time. Grappling with Unity’s DOTS tools has made me understand- object-oriented design is easy for people to work with but hard for computers to work with. When performance really matters it isn’t the way.
So that’s how I came to Rust. People tell me it’s a good language to unlearn bad habits that come from object oriented thinking. Developers seem to like Rust and I just learned about the Bevy Engine which may have sealed the deal for me on this whole “learn Rust” compulsion I’ve developed. We will see.
So yes. Stuff I want to do some day. Thanks for reading if you did. Thanks for scrolling to the base of the blog just to read this message if you didn’t (but why though?). I’ll be back next week with a for real update on our Game Dev projects- they are still progressing, I just wanted to side-track today. Until then.
* This song might actually be the soundtrack for my whole life- but Iet’s see how the next couple years shake out.
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