Why did I choose that title? Well, because that's what I've been doing :P
Life's been getting increasingly busy ever since I left the nest. I now have all these things that I know are worth, but man, they take so much time. It is inevitable to sacrifice some of 'em in order to do the others right, but still. I get nostalgic sometimes from when I used to be able to just spend the whole day learning about computers, languages and esoterica but I truly do not want to live like that again, nostalgia just fucks you up that way.
It is true I've been programming less, reading less, studying less (pc & languages), working out less, watching less movies and anime, playing less videogames, etc, etc. However, I am building and actually maintaining human relationships with friends and family. I even got to experience what being in love feels like, still do ;) And well, you know what they say about successful gamedev's and girlfriends :P
As I mentioned on some other post (I think?), I am actually creating more and making more stuff. Now that I think about it, I am also playing the guitar more, hmm. I am not just learning for the sake of learning, I am learning in order to be able to DO stuff that I want to do and well, having certs on top of projects is very useful in the current job market. So here's a screenshot of something I've been working on recently using raylib (C++):
I'm not sure it's going to be an actual dungeon crawler, but I do plan on making the levels maze-like using some sort of algorithm that fills a grid with either a 1 or a 0. I enjoy so much not having to deal with OpenGL boilerplate it is unreal. Instead of just jumping straight to programming a game engine, as my naive younger self did, I am working through different layers of abstraction.
Commercial GE -> Graphics API wrapper -> Graphics API -> GPU drivers
I am not sure if I want to get into GPU driver programming, not for the foreseeable future, but it's there. At the moment I dream of becoming a Graphics Engineer, I just love the technical aspect of rendering very much. Coming back to topic, all the knowledge I had of OpenGL really made things easier, not gonna lie. I was able to just add lighting, custom render targets and post processing in a breeze (most of the hard work was writing shaders, the part I like the most).
Maybe I could get into a game's modding community to keep doing more soykaf, I don't know. I remember when I wanted to become a game hacker and do 1337 things like reverse engineering, rewriting assembly, finding pointers and all that cool stuff. But oh well, is there a programmer out there that hasn't fantasized at least once with being a hacker?
In any case, I try to remind to myself daily not to focus on the destination but rather on the path (in every aspect of life, not just learning). It is not uncommon for me to hurry and do everything asap, I rush myself constantly, as if I was running out of time or whatever. That's what happened to me when I dived directly into making a game engine even though I hadn't even touched OpenGL before. But I've come to learn that focusing on results and rushing things up makes me more prone to taking shortcuts that in the long run cost me a lot.
Who wouldn't like to know exactly what decisions and steps to take in order to make the most out of life and get the perfect ending? But it doesn't work that way. The future is uncertain and things take time, you can't change that.
Your best shot is trying to learn more about yourself and simply hope for the best. That's how everyone lived, lives and will ever live, you are no exception.
Enough, I'm gonna go play some Don't Starve.
s/blogpost