This Week’s Program: Dec 5 - Dec 9

I just realized that last week I got Friday’s date wrong in my tinyletter. Oops.

Tonight at 21:00 UTC-5:00 is when the Ludum Dare 37 begins. Ludum Dare is probably the most well-known game jam. Its notoriety stems in large part from the participation of Notch, the creator of Minecraft and “men’s rights advocate” (see also: complete asshole). I have decided not to participate in this Ludum Dare. I think it requires a level of planning and commitment that I am currently unable to deliver. I do intend to do it at some point, but I hope to have some more experience under my belt and more tools at my disposal. It feels like a bummer to bow out, but I know that if I deluded myself up until the last minute into thinking I could actively participate, it would have been a bigger bummer when reality eventually set in. There’s a lot to learn between now and when I would feel competent enough to jam.

Not a lot of progress on hive-city this week. I took some time to think critically about how I approached the code and began a little refactoring. Vera, my amazing wife and frequent This Week’s Program presence, has been taking an intense, week-long Data Analytics course at General Assembly. Data (either big or small) has never been a strong suit of mine, and so I’ve spent time this week riding her coattails, picking up some tricks in Excel and SQL. I’m so proud of her. She is a self-determined, disciplined learner, and I’m more of a lazy noodler. I’ve found that a lot of programmers look down their noses at Excel, but it is an incredibly powerful tool. One highlight from my second-hand data apprenticeship has been discovering and using csvkit. I’m still not a strong data person, but knowing what is possible opens so many doors.

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On Monday, I finally added a Tinyletter index to my personal website. Look at all those words!

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Back in hive-city. Last week I created the Roll Msg. This week, I use that to execute all Instructions, even those that don’t use Dice.

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I also start my refactoring effort. Here, I’m slowly teasing out the GameState concerns into a new module, Game.

The idea here is that there’s a lot going on in the Game, but I want to reserve my Main module for taking in user input and executing updates to the Game state. There’s also other stuff beyond the Game — there’s Gang creation, potentially a little tutorial thing, maybe login stuff… I think that the Game shouldn’t be aware of mouse clicks or keyboard actions, but just making sure that the game state is advancing. This is also where I introduce having two players.

This is just the beginning, and I’m letting some of this code emerge. If you look closely, you can see my enthusiasm for this project waning.

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I add csv-mode to my Emacs setup. I haven’t used it yet, because all my data is too big.

📊 Mark