The Monthly Shipping Report
So in September I said I was going to be writing about what I do code wise every month. Part of the idea is to keep me motivated and accountable for writing this blog, but also help me learn new things.
The goal was to try and ship at least 1-2 projects a month. For October and November, life got in the way and a job change occurred.
December 2015 Monthly Shipping Report
For this month I wanted to see if I could ship a side project like a Javascript game. Unfortunately, a new job has kept me really busy and my big Javascript dreams fell by the wayside.
What Was Shipped
Here is what I shipped that is of note:
- ruby_asteroids – This was a simple clone of the old classic game Asteroids using Ruby and the Gosu gaming library. As of right now (12/2/15), it’s fairly simple and doesn’t quite have the right “feel”, but the basics are all there. This was actually written closer towards the end of November, but I didn’t include it in the November shipping report.
- Since I seem to be constantly taking Coursera courses, I also wrote some algorithms for a course I’ve been taking as well. I’m not including a link to it since the code is “hacky” Java that is more for my learning than anything else.
What I Learned
As usual, the time is flying by. In between trying to maintain this blog, schedule some real honest to goodness personal time off, and a job change, it’s been a bit hard to maintain momentum.
The two takeaways for me for this month are that external deadlines are a good forcing function (I made the asteroids game as part of a workshop I attended). The other takeaway is that it’s also possible to accomplish quite a bit in 12 hours of coding provided you are able to break things down into manageable chunks and you schedule that time as a sacred commitment to yourself in your calendar (more on this in an upcoming post).
Upcoming
Right now, I want to keep learning JavaScript, Elixir, and finish yet another Coursera course.