Voyaging Mind

Yesterday marked a nice point in 2017. I finished a small game. Well it is more a practice game meant to get me back into coding at home, rebuild my SDL experience and let me lay down a work flow that I am happy with. By any standards the game it terrible. I have written better implementations in Javascript in an evening. But that is not the point. I am happy because it is complete :) This game is not that relevant the other bits are. I feel at home coding with nvim and using the shell to "automate the boring stuff". I want to talk about the fledgling process I have in place to make dev at home nice as I am quite happy with it. But it has only been a month or so and the real test is whether I find myself continuing to use way of coding or whether I flip back to an IDE. On time will give that answer. So this post is a Yay coding at home seems to be in a good place at the moment. August is going to be a busy month family wise, plus it is the month I need to up my mile

So I have been spending a bit of time with my tooling at the moment. Previously I was using visual studio code on Linux as my main editor and meson/ninja for building. For the small projects I do at home this set up works quite well. With the exception of rename refactoring I don't miss the features of a more full IDE. Again for small projects, I might change my mind if I was working on a million line C++ project at home. At home I drift from using a desktop PC to a, now aging, laptop and back again. It has no rhyme or reason to it. Using an editor like VS code on a laptop is slightly annoying and I have fairly big hands and those cursor keys are all scrunched together. I am not a fan of touch pads either for anything more than browsing. The natural progression here is to not use the cursors keys. To me that means a return to vim. I actually decided to use neovim because of the built in terminal integration. Of course, other than playing with it I have not used it in anger.

It is fair to say I am pretty obsessed with fast iteration cycles at the moment. It was a motivating reason I relooked at coding in C. I found I enjoyed coding in C but sometimes miss the algorithms that exist in C++’s STL.  It really depends on the task. What I realise I had not thought about much is getting fast iteration speeds by leaving behind system levels languages. Using something like Java, Kotlin or  C#. All compile pretty quickly and I  get some superb tooling with them. Of course it means leaving behind memory efficient data structures.   For some projects this would be not a bad idea. I have had the urge to create a few small games and started to write one in C++. It only occurred to me tonight every time I do this I fail.  The only times I  have successfully release anything to the public I have been using  Java. Weird but true. I should also blog more :)