What I've Been Up To

Been a while since I made a blog post, so I figured I’d write about what I’ve been learning as a of late. I’ve made strides in C++, I’m a bit more comfortable with pointers, as always stated the best way to learn is to throw yourself in the deep end and learn to swim. I’ve reversed engineered simple C++ projects to made use of pointers, breaking it until I figured out how things worked, and from there I’ve made a really small project that uses C++, the project itself is unconventional as I also wanted use vectors because I’m relearning math (I vomited).

Other goals I have are learning Rust because I find it to be pretty interesting as a language and how it’s positioning itself, alongside this I’ve also dabbled with React Native and Flutter. At one point in my budding career I made an iPhone app with Swift 2, and I surprisingly still remember a lot about iPhone development–one day I really want to take on the absolutely monstrous task of updating the app from Swift2 to current–and so I wanted to compare the various avenues available to iPhone app creation. Flutter is interesting in how everything is in a stack (pretty sure they don’t call it stack though) I like it but it’s hard to reason about your code as you it gets longer and longer, I really love Dart as a programming language though and would love to see it get more life but that’s up to the will of the community. React Native is familiar to me because well…I know React so moving over to React Native wasn’t too much of a struggle. Despite the fact I mostly work with Javascript/HTML/CSS, and that I am constantly working with React, I still don’t feel I’m great at it (it being React), slightly frustrating.

Other things I’ve been dabbling in are graphics programming, specifically OpenGL and DirectX, at the moment I’ve been mostly learning the fundamentals, drawing a pixel on screen, projection matrix/orthogonal matrix. I’m making sure not to spread myself thin so I don’t get burned out, but I’m definitely enjoying learning about these things.

The graphics programming is very low priority and it’s what I do to “reward” myself for data structures and algorithm studies. I still don’t know them all by memory but I have a very solid understand on why they exist, why some are better in some situations over others. I had always known big O notation though I’m not sure from where so that definitely helped in learning these things, but it truly changes your perspective on developing good programming practices. On this subject one area I still need to focus on problem solving and specifically problem solving challenges that many websites have like hackerrank, etc. I find myself not dedicating time to this and that’s something I plan to change.