January 29th, 2019

Why Now?

Here we have the obligatory "Hello, World" post, a staple in developer blogs everywhere. This is far from the first time I've written such a post, probably the 4th time or so by now.

Here's hoping that it's the last time, though.

So, as the title asks, Why Now? Why start again, what is the catalyst, what is the inspiration, what is the goal?

In December of 2018 I was becoming burnt out chasing the standard side projects. Trying to make the next million dollar mobile app or some great SAAS sure to provide copious monthly recurring revenue. I somehow stumbled across a sale that Udemy was having, and after browsing a bit, ended up on a course for Unity 2D.

While I have always loved games, and hold a degree in 3D Graphics Programming, I had previously only written one, at a weekend hackathon. It was a pretty neat little BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) based, single screen fighting game. You could swing a sword, or fire a fireball (if I recall), and try to kill the other local players. It didn't really spark any desire to keep doing games though. But this time, when I came across the course, it actually was really appealing. I hadn't written C# since taking the current job, so it would be a fun two-for-one - check out what's new in C# land, and learn a game engine.

As I began working through the course, learning all kinds of new game development things, and brushing up on the math I'd long since forgotten, the thought occured to me that rather than continuing to dump snippets and links into my Evernote, I could set up a small site to share that information with the world. And, to keep my stuff presentable and organized, so I could also get some long term value out of it!

Another reason is kind of a fatigue around the current internet. Having quit Facebook over a year ago, and massively cutting down my Reddit time, I started reflecting back onto the internet I grew up with - what did it look like, what did it feel like?

I thought that maybe if I tried to make yet another site, this time it could be less of a standard blog - no WordPress, no ads, no cookie cutter rank and file. It could be more like the old times, where I not only posted posts, but also maintained things like lists of books I enjoyed, and mountains of links that I've collected.

Dare I say even MySpace-y, where you had complete control of your space, and did with it what you willed... That sounded pretty appealing the more I thought about it.

Around the time all of this was culminating, I was making the rounds on the sites I like to check once in a while, and noticed that Fabien Sanglard had a new look to his site, complimented with a post explaining his cause for redesign.

The gist of the post, which you should definitely take the time to read, is that our internet has become kind of a sorry state of affairs. Even the simplest sites have a ton of Javascript libraries, mountains of unoptomized images, countless trackers and analytics, and a million other intrusive issues that just destroy their user's devices and experiences. Which, in his opinion, and mine, is just wrong.

After reading that post, I filed away a thought that if I ever decided to do a site, it'd be simple, and elegant. Maybe boring even. That's what this site is - boring! Hopefully full of value (increasing with respect to time, of course), but all hand written. No libraries, no frameworks, no database even. Pure speed and efficiency.

The final piece needed to get this thing up and running was giving in to what plagues all of us developers - the desire to work on something new.

I was just about halfway through the roughly 65 hour long Unity course, and needed a little break. You can only animate so many things before your eyes glaze over and such. So, I took a miniature detour, to spend a week building this site.

Now that it's done, it has kind of provided a double value to me. I'm reinvigorated and ready to dive back into Unity, and, I now have a place to catalog and share everything I learn.

So, thanks for reading, I hope to see you again!

- Josh