About three years ago my coding career started by accident. I worked at the U of M physics lab writing a physics simulation of the Milky Way in C. I learned a few things from it:
It was a pair of lessons I will never forget and to this day I have not tried to write C again.
Fast forward a few years and I now get paid to program. It is an odd turn of events I never expected, but I can’t complain about the results. On a day to day basis I normally work with:
These days my work is a lot of web development and my outside-of-work work tends to follow that vein also. My side projects have tended to be mainly front end (a couple jQuery plugins, a few games, and an analyzer), but I work server side a little too.
My homepage describes most of my projects, so I won’t go into any detail on them. Instead, I wanted to talk about what types of projects I’ve been working on.
Briangles, Circles, and ShapeEscape are the three games I’ve made so far both as experiments in game development and as a way to better learn D3. Briangles wasn’t terribly popular and taught me that games need to simple and addictive. Next in line was Circles which was significantly more popular (relatively of course) and is where I developed my first game engine. ShapeEscape was bootstrapped off of the Circles game engine and hasn’t been released yet (aka posted anywhere). My next post will be about the game engines I developed.
My two jQuery plugins were my first open source contributions. At least now I don’t feel quite as bad when I use other people’s code.
One of my most recent projects was the iTunes Analyzer. It was born from my interest in analytics and near obsession with listening to music. I’ve always looked for good iTunes analyzers, but haven’t found any over the years so I made my own. I made sure to allow other users to upload their own iTunes data so they can share in the analytics.
I hope others can learn from the problems I’ve encountered and code I’ve created, but even if no one reads this I aim to get something out of writing posts like learning to write better and gather my thoughts about lessons learned after (or during a project). If you are one of those elusive readers, happy coding!