What were you thinking?

13 Jun 2017

One of the interesting things about keeping a blog is reading back over your old posts. It’s a bit like coming across old code, sometimes I read things that I’ve written and find myself disagreeing with my past self, other times I cringe at how naive I was or at my lack of understanding of the subject matter. Those feelings often prevent me from writing or publishing new posts because I worry what others will think or what I will think in the future. It’s funny because there is no better indicator of self-improvement than looking back and realising how little you knew and it will probably be far more worrisome the day I look at old code and cannot see any room for improvement.

I’m sure everyone experiences that kind of retrospective cringe and there probably isn’t much you can do about it. The one feeling that you can tackle is guilt. I’m wracked with professional guilt. I feel guilty for not keeping my blog up to date and I feel guilty for not finishing any of the dozens of side projects I’ve undertaken over the years. I read blog posts saying how important it is to finish what you start and to get it out to the community, how you should finish one project before starting on another and what not finishing projects says about you as a developer. Ultimately I’ve decided to stop feeling guilty because 1) there’s more to life than programming and 2) who can be bothered? Seriously, who can be bothered nudging UI around the screen until it’s pixel perfect or adding dozens of audio queues or tracking down a crash bug on one particular device running some custom flavour of a really old Android version. If you want to do all that in your spare time then I applaud you; but frankly I do enough of that tedious stuff day-to-day at work. I don’t need to prove I can finish games in my spare time because I finish and ship games as a day job.

What I want to do in my spare time is have fun. I enjoy programming and I enjoy tackling new challenges. The best thing about programming at home is getting a chance to do something you wouldn’t do at work. Once you’ve solved the problem and completed the challenge, why bother with all the other stuff required to make it into a product. Here’s a list of some of the stuff that I’ve done in my spare time over the last year:

1. Implemented a half finished top-down racer in Pico-8 (just to see what programming on the Pico-8 was like).
2. Started learning functional programming and wrote a program that simulated turns of a simple battle game (with no graphics).
3. Started writing a Gameboy emulator (to see how different it was from the Chip-8 one – turns out quite a bit different).
4. Solved like half the puzzles on CodinGame using C, C++, Python or Scala.
5. Wrote an AI bot to compete in one of those online battles (I won a couple of fights and lost a couple of fights but I was more interested in finding out how to host that kind of thing).
6. Wrote a Python script to play Countdown (worked well for the letters but couldn’t always get the best number).
7. Ported some of my early programming attempts from OOP to data oriented.
8. Learned how they implemented the fire in Far Cry 2 and replicated it (without any visuals or actual fire).

The point of all these projects was to have fun and learn something new. Often the learning outcomes made me a better and more effective programmer in my day-to-day work, but some of the stuff I learned I’ll probably never use again – and you know what? I knew that at the time! It wasn’t the point.

So I’m not going to feel guilty for not finishing stuff or for having 6 projects on at the same time. However what I will do more of is blog about, and put on GitHub, some of my half-finished, half-baked projects, if for no other reason than so I can look back in 5 years and say of my past self “What were you thinking?”.

P.S: This should hopefully kickstart a run of blog posts about things that have been rattling round in my head for a while, but if it doesn’t then so what?