Neveronti.me

Well fuck, it's been ages since I've posted anything. I mean, you should have expected this given the title of the blog, but still. I've been pretty busy over the past few months since I've last posted (holy shit, half a year already). Over that time I basically finished my internship. My boss said he'd offer me some contract work, but that hasn't really happened as he seems pretty busy with some app and a kickstarter clone and I'm busy making a game and learning math. The summer was generally unremarkable from a blogging standpoint, at least looking back at it after almost a quarter of schooling. I worked, I went home and hung out with my girlfriend, occasionally programming at home when I had free time away from my two full-time jobs. I usually just worked on the aforementioned game that I will shed no more details on for an in-depth post later on.

This quarter in school was an interesting one, I thought it would just be my relaxation quarter. Really just a nice way of saying I couldn't get into any of the classes I wanted too, so the only classes I had were GEs. I ended up swapping out of a music class to take a math class I probably should have been taking anyways. That being said, this quarter really wasn't very stressful, I reliably procrastinated doing math homework, so that resulted in some all too familiar near-midnight math cramming. I'm also taking a history class, where I waited till the last minute to write a few surprisingly good papers. Given the results I'm not even sure if my procrastination for papers is accidental, they sure do give my grade a boost. Also I'm taking a network class, more for fun than anything else. It sure is a nice change of pace from the other two. A good teacher doesn't hurt much either.

Aside from school, I've been working on quite a variety of different programming this as well. I've started learning C++, which as it turns out is pretty fun to program in. I really like the level of control and customization it gives you. The only problem with learning C++ is that I can't get any of the compilers to work on my windows 7 machine, my main desktop. In order to learn the language I had to SSH on to my school's server, write the programs using vim, and then compile them using the g++ compiler. It was certainly a retro experience, the whole thing made me feel as if I was going back in time a good decade. Another programming experience that brought me back to the past was deciding to learn WebGL, a decision I'm still trying to find the origin of. 3D programming is still kind of weird to me. My only previous experience with 3D was a one night stand with the unity engine that resulted in a barebones FPS like experience that you can find here. WebGL is much different, much harder, and strangely compelling. So far I'm just getting into texture mapping, so don't expect anything amazing coming soon, but you can see the 3D rotating chest I made here and some ps1 looking triangles here.

Anyways that's enough for now. I'll try to remember to post more sometime soon in the next week. Finals are coming, so it might have to wait for a while, but hopefully I will (for once) be on time.

Well, It's been a while since I've posted anything, but if you can't tell by the title, the last couple of weeks have been extremely busy. I finished all of my finals and did about as well as I expected, moved out of school to back home in Southern California, and got an internship making websites for a bunch of companies.

All of these changes have resulted in me having very little free time, and even less free time in front of a computer without work to do. This is why I've been more or less absent from the blog since the last post. On the bright side, the internship is doing wonders for my web-dev portfolio, so the next thing I work on this site will definitely have more info about the site's I've worked on (excluding some rather sketchy personal ones *cough cough). We use a WordPress theme using the bootstrap framework, so everything looks nice and professional. It's the first time I've worked with WordPress, and I have to say, as much as I hate the ideals of using a CMS, it does make creating websites much easier and faster. I usually hate using programs for making websites because it takes away control from more tech-friendly people such as myself, but after using WordPress for a few weeks I can safely say that my assumption was completely correct. One example was for one of our sites, we had a top ten list with links to modals explaining each list item. WordPress automatically formatted the modals and added in some text with the assumption they were being used for projects instead of products. In order to literally change one word, I had to sift through all of the files in WordPress for one small string of text. It's just way too much effort to change one word in the website. Needless to say, I'm definitely not going to do any serious work in WordPress unless it's completely front-end work.

On the positive side, working with the front end has significantly increased my skill with CSS. Unfortunately the way that I designed this particular website makes it so it's on the more time consuming side to change the way that the CSS is formatted, and the changes are mostly just timesaving things anyways, so I'm just gonna keep this site the way it is.

Also something cool that I did right before finals was a cool little chat program that I made to test my AJAX skills. If you want to chat with people, you can find that here. AJAX is a pretty cool thing to work with, so I'm definitely going to work more with that soon, maybe make a game of some sort.

Speaking of game, yeah, I really haven't had any spare time to get started on that, but if I get an extended amount of free time, I may actually begin to make something for the first time in forever.

Anyway, I have work to do so I better get going. So until then.

-Daniel

Summer is almost here!

Well, after about 28 weeks, my first year of college is about to come to an end. The only thing is my way is the three finals that I have to take. In the same day. Fun.

In other news, I made a Fiverr. Not because I'm really desperate for money or anything, but because now that I'm mostly done with this site, I'm gonna need something to work on, and I might as well get more experience making websites. If you want to see the fiverr page, you can click here to be taken to it.

Speaking of this website, I'm working on the comment system right now (well not right now, I'm taking a break to type this out). Work on that is going as smoothly as it can, the only real speed bumps showing up in how to prevent spam.

Because I'm terrible at ordering things, I should probably talk about the game already. I recently got my hands on a copy of the Kenney Donation Pack, which is basically a .zip file filled with a variety of soulless vector-esque game assets. These assets cover about every form of 2-D game imaginable, ranging from vertical scrolling space ship shooters to hex-based strategy games. Up until this point, all of my game literally used squares as placeholder graphics. Now you might be saying "Oh, that's not a big deal, you're a programmer, not an artist", although I agree with that statement, I have to test these games a lot. And I mean a lot! and the process would probably be a little less mentally taxing if I took the risk of my eyes bleeding out of the equation. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to that. Whatever I make, there is a very strong chance it will be tile based, so I'll keep you up to date with that.

Well I clearly have a very busy few weeks ahead, so until then.

-Daniel