Friday, May 22, 2015

Things to do this summer

Today was the last actual school day of the 2014-15 academic year for me (yay finals are done!) so now it's summer. This means I have a lot of time on my hands, and I hope to accomplish something more publicly visible than reading a bunch of interesting stuff on the Internet, as much as I like doing that. These are my ideas:

  • Make Abiathar Online. This will require learning JavaScript, which is something I really should do. It would also be my first actual open-source project. (I'd accept pull requests and everything!)
  • Improve Abiathar (the real, desktop one) in some way. It would be kind of neat to have an integrated graphics editor, but there's not a huge amount of demand for that. Reinventing Abiathar as a total modding solution (texts, sprite behaviors, etc.) would be really awesome and also a huge amount of work. Note that such a program was the original goal of FMod, which turned into FleexCore2, which powers Abiathar.
  • Learn C++. This is another language serious developers should know, and I don't. I'm picking up a few concepts through my wanderings into P/Invoke, but I'm still up in managed .NET where memory allocations poof in and out of existence when you need it. The Windows API is another thing I should know my way around, even if only to understand what Raymond Chen is talking about.
  • Make Ineffable Learning. I'm kind of afraid to start this because I've never had any serious success in web programming and I'm afraid I'll royally mess up the architecture right off the starting line. The point of Abiathar Online was to get experience in web development, but it occurs to me now that those are two different types of web programming (one client-side and the other mostly server-side). There are always volunteers though - this wasn't really meant to be an individual project.
  • Learn mobile app development. Having a snazzy new Android smartphone seems like a great opportunity to start creating apps for phones. That's a huge market, and I'm missing out by not knowing anything about it.
  • Practice chess. I still play chess, but not a whole lot; I'm not currently getting any better. There are books of openings I should study, and online games might be helpful as well.
  • Not forget all the Chinese I learned. I'm not sure where to find good resources for learning the language that are Internetty and also free. The Chinese StackExchange might help. I could also try to narrate things in Chinese to myself.
  • Do things with friends. Being an introvert means I can get along fine alone (look at all these other things I could be doing by myself!) but it'd be nice to chat with people? Maybe? I guess socialism socialization is a good thing.
  • Create documentation. Abiathar's manual hasn't been updated in a long time; it's pretty out-of-date. I should hammer out the updates to that document and maybe rearrange or split up the "advanced use" section. Or, I could just create bite-sized demo/tutorial videos and add them to the new Abiathar video documentation playlist.
  • Write more meaningful blog posts. I find that I'm pushing half-baked thoughts out onto the Internet in the name of consistent posting. Maybe I should try to get some really interesting, thought-provoking essays together in a less spontaneous writing style. (I do have a couple serious topics I want to cover thoroughly but haven't done the necessary research.)

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