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2013-05-26: The last 20%

I had forgotten how hard it was to finish writing a game. My memories of Cylindrix have been glossed over by almost 20 years of nostalgia.

Finishing another has brought to the forefront buried emotions and time that I had forgotten ever happened.

Hours and hours spent on meaningless moments that only fix problems of today.

Yesterday, we spent hours on deprecated behaviors of MS-DOS that don't matter today. Now that we have reasonable libraries that play WAV files on the CD, why bother?

I spent hours trying to port Box2D to Lua to work in the engine I'm using. I spent 2 days converting C code that evaluated Poker hands.

I am not using either of these pieces of code. To program is to try try try, implement with the full force of your soul, and fail repeatedly.

But the failure is not the worst part. It is when your crappy code succeeds, that is the worst part. Sometimes your misbegotten spawn grows legs and is fruitful.

It is then that they challenge you. Now they have legs. Now they will never leave you.

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2013-05-03: Progress

A couple of years ago I thought about the archaic build process of Cylindrix and thought, "Ho ho! So long ago! So glad I'm not in that hole!"

I changed something on my dev machine almost an hour ago. I pushed it to the git repository. Then I pulled it to the test machine. Then I built it. Then I copied it to the destination filesystem. Then I ran squashfs on it. Then I copied it to a thumb drive installer.

Then I rebooted, changed BIOS settings. Then I booted off of the thumb drive, formatted the destination CF card, and waited for the installer to do its thing.

As I type this, it is still installing.

I am pretty sure this is build process hell.

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2013-04-26: The punches keep coming

It is hard to keep up with software development, especially at the ripe old age of 37. Especially when projects at work can take several months. Two years blow by like Pixie Stix dust.

And then I turn around and the new cool hotness is old school notness. Suddenly I realize that something I wrote two years ago is horrid and profane,

But nobody cares today. People want new features, new tools, new automatic notifications, cleaner screens, nicer buttons, fewer clicks, their bugs fixed.

The system grows larger and more onerous, a labyrinth of ideas hatched from minds long gone from the company.

It can take a month to simply refactor a hastily designed emergency fix cranked out in a weekend two years ago.

And while you are grinding away at domain-specific issues, the world speeds by. High school boys high on testosterone are running automated tools and trying to crack into your creaking code.

New patterns that the industry engulfs seem ugly and inelegant, but all the cool kids are eating it up.

So you slog along and spend your nights and weekends building pet projects in "new" frameworks that are only new to you because you are old and buried in legacy code.

Initial release: 2010. So long ago.

So far, I freaking love knockout.js.

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2013-04-10: Global Variables

Young programmers, I promise you: Global variables are not considered evil because of some sort of pretentious aesthetic imposed upon you by Ivory Tower Sages.

I just spent 3 hours chasing down a bug caused by one copy-pasted variable that inadvertently accessed a global. Globals eat your time -- and the best parts of your life.

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2013-03-21: Lua Table Nuances

Lua has only one data structure: tables. This is similar to PHP arrays, and like PHP, they do double-duty as indexed and hashed.

Lua:

foo = {}
foo[1] = 1 --Note -- lua arrays are 1 indexed
foo[2] = 2

--Lua has a special operator "#" that tells you the length of a table/array

print( # foo ) --prints 2

BUT...

foo = {}
foo["bar"] = 1
foo["czar"] = 2

print( # foo ) --prints 0 !!!!!!

Unless you explicitly index your table with integers, Lua tells you that your "array" (table) is zero length.

BOO

I am going to paraphrase a famous language designer whose name escapes me:
"There are two types of computer languages. The types that people bitch about, and the types that nobody uses."

It is soooo true. The more you learn a language, the more you hate it.

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