2021 Retrospective

(or, why I didn't work on those projects)

The remainder of 2021 was somewhat eventful (in a good way)! Among other things, I:

• Moved out of state
• Bought a house
• Acquired another dog

Most of my personal projects were sidelined, including the ones from my previous blogpost. Now that we're settling in, I've finally been able to make some time to work on some "productive" hobbies.

Gardening

We have a backyard now! It needs to be landscaped before we can do any serious planting, but we need to wait for HOA approval for that. In the meantime, we started some Aerogarden grow kits:

They're doing surprisingly well, considering how hard our tap water is.

Fitness

As weather permits, I'm consistently jogging the Big Dog (soon to be The Small Dog) about a mile and a half five times a week. I'm pretty happy with this progress.

Code

I've found it really difficult to find motivation to work on another "todo list", but I did play around with a few game development tools:

• I started prototyping a wall-running mechanic with Unity. This experience was somewhat sobering - part of my regrets not taking linear algebra, because it would have been really useful for this. The math isn't necessarily the hard part here, especially since the computer is doing most of the work. The part I'm finding difficult is determining which equations to use to solve a given problem.
   
• I built some toy applications using Ruby2D. This was tremendous fun. It was refreshing to build games by writing code, rather than dragging models and navigating through a series of opaque GUI widgets. I was delighted to find that this gem worked exactly as documented, out of the box. I've played with similar Ruby libraries before, and I've usually had issues getting them to work correctly on Windows. 
   
• I started dabbling in asset creation:
  • I've been (audibly) doodling with Bandlab and Ableton.
  • I'm currently working on modeling a series of donuts (and fritters) in Blender
  • I made a pixel-pirate in Gimp, and I'm currently working on turning him into an entire spritesheet.
    

Blogging

Yeah, I didn't really do this. I'll try to stay on top of it this year.