September 2021 Update

Published on 9 October 2021.

This is what I’ve been up to in September 2021:

• I created a short movie about what programming is like for me. You can watch it here and read about my behind the scenes thoughts here. I mainly did it to explore movie making.

• I continued to work on RLMeta. Specifically on the second poster version.

  • At first my plan was to make a second poster with an improved version of RLMeta. The goal would be to showcase an even more beautiful implementation.

  • However, the idea of a second poster was putting too much pressure on me. If I did a second poster, I would want it to be perfect. And I never seemed to get there. I was able to improve many things in RLMeta, but somehow imperfections always kept creeping in.

  • So to relief the pressure of making a more polished poster, I decided to instead write a blog post about this new version in a “code walkthrough” style. That blog post could be the start of a README for a dedicated project repo for RLMeta. At some time I would have to publish the blog post, so that is a bit of a pressure, but I can more easily tweak it closer to publishing time because generating a new blog post is an automatic process whereas creating a poster from source code is a manuall process (that requires manual layout decisions). The blog post will be another way to showcase RLMeta.

• I read about Handmade. I was inspired by the idea to implement more things “by hand” and not layer abstraction on abstraction that creates a slow mess. I though about designing programming systems where you could more easily implement things at a lower level to avoid creating lots of abstractions when not needed.

• I created a dedicated notebook for project ideas that I have. I have more ideas than I have time to work on. I think I need to focus on one project at a time to make progress.

• I thought about how to make hobby programming a habit. My hobby projects are things I want to make progress on, but on the other hand, they should be fun. They are hobby projects right? But even hobby projects are not interesting all the time. Sometimes you just have to push through.