I definitely appreciated having Monday off work and being able to spend some time on my own projects. This is partially carrot-motivated (projects are fun! I love crossing things off my to-do list!) and heavily stick-motivated (I’ve been stressin’ about needing to invest in my competency outside of work), but as long as it’s motivated I’m happy.

Ideal Monday

The main project I’m focussing on right now is cleaning up a university assignment from 2013; weatherworld was a super marks-focussed OpenGL project that displays a map with some randomised weather. I decided to dust it off for a few reasons:

  • Intentionally learning/understanding how the graphics pipeline works will be super helpful for the kinds of things I’m doing at work.
  • Building on an existing project is way easier than starting from scratch - it’s quicker to see results and make small changes rather than getting bogged down in scaffolding (not the goal here)
  • Getting a Java project cleanly set up on my macbook seemed like a good thing to know how to do; this allows me to learn maven and so bump up my tools knowledge as well as my code knowledge.

Nighttime

The end goal of this is to take in a location and display appropriate weather, but we’re a long way off. I spent this morning playing with auto-generation of levels and getting that up to minimum viability - the actual processing of that input definitely needs some improvement, but I’m pleased with progress. I had to relearn a bunch about bezier curves; turns our my lecturer gave us sample code for roads and so I never properly understood it.

Daytime

Next focus point is probably smoothing out the ground and creating a ‘base’ for it, so that it’s not quite so 2-dimensional.