2022-08-07

Is this thing on?

3:30p

After a bit of a hiatus, I'm back! Things were really crazy for a while there. The TLDR - while out on sabbatical, I realized that it was time for me to consider moving on from my current day job. I had a great talk with my boss, and we came up with a plan to slowly work on divesting my current tasks. This was greatly aided by the sabbatical - we had basically already gone through this exercise!

As for "what's next" - I wanted to cast a wide net. I applied to any positions that looked interesting to me, in a variety of industries, but all were in the private sector - my main goal was to get some experience working on a large product/platform, as one engineer among a large group of engineers. I had a bunch of really great interviews, and a bunch of not-so-great interviews - I learned a lot there, and will probably write up some more concrete thoughts on this process at a later date.

All of that to say, that I am now one month in to my new job as Senior Backend Software Engineer at Eventbrite! So far the experience has been fantastic, and I'm really enjoying the team that I get to work with! I'm excited about what the future has in store.

Okay, so, now that the business of job interviews, offboarding, onboarding, etc have finally settled down, I'm ready to hop back into some game dev work! I've been dreaming of PICO-8 over the last few months, so I think that's what's next for me here.

I'm going to spend the next chunk of time working on setting up a functional dev env for PICO-8 - I just can't get behing writing code in the built-in editor (although that sentiment might changed). I think this might be a theme on this blog though - don't make me use your editor, it's rude.

3:45p

Some dev env notes:

I already had Windows Powertoys installed - there's an option to "pin" a window on top, which is perfect for a guy who likes his terminal emulator to be full-screen, but also wants to see the PICO-8 VM. Ctrl+Win+T.

Bakudankun/PICO-8.vim seems like a nice little plugin - plus it shows your sprite in the editor, which is neat.

https://github.com/Bakudankun/PICO-8.vim

4:15p

I have a basic dev env set up - we'll see how long it lasts - I have a feeling that my hunch of "hands off my editor" is probably misguided, so we'll see.

4:45p

The PICO-8 fanzine is fantastic.

https://sectordub.itch.io/pico-8-fanzine-1

5:00p

That's a wrap - made it through Alex Mole's PICO-8 fanzine tutorial on building a pong clone - a great guide!

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