Spider Flock
July 2021 Goals
03 July 2021

It monthly update time. I guess this is going to be semi-regular thing.

Last month I planned to:

What I actually did:

Other (non goals):

Quick discussion

First the resounding success is I managed to work on the platform game for about 40hrs. Alas near the end of the month I decided to ditch Rust and rewrite in in C++. There is a couple of paragraphs discussing later on.

The study took a back seat but after a few hours taking a look at Software Design For Flexibility. I realised that I was probably not familiar enough with the Scheme programming language to really benefit from it. Some positive came out of it that I will touch on later.

I failed to write any experimental code. This is a lower priority objective and is really an excuse to goof off and write some random code. I think I am going to change the title of this to Just for Fun if I decide to keep it in.

This gives me a score of about 3.5/5.0. As this is the first month of tracking and goal setting I am not sure if this is a good score or whether I should aim to get a lower or higher score. Attempting more difficult things will lower the score but be beneficial in the long run.

Goals

For July I am setting these goals.

This is only 40, but there are a couple things in July that may limit the hours I can spend on fun tech stuff.

Observations

I am feeling quite burnt out. This is mostly down to lack of sleep/too many things going on. I am going to make a proper attempt to fix this this month. I don't have a proper plan yet but it is something I feel is important to tackle. A side effect maybe I spend more hours actually working on the goals as energy may increase.

So I dropped Rust. Rust is awesome and I really recommend it. It is just not right for me at this point in time. A combination of feeling a little bit burnt out and wanting to focus on projects rather than learning the language means I just want a language I am familiar with. I didn't have problems with the borrow checker or lifetime analysis. Perhaps I have played with Rust enough for them to not be a bit deal it. It is my desire to focus on other things that is the cause. I am sure I will return to it at some point.

For the study goals of last month I needed to write some code in Scheme. For that I needed an editor with reasonable support for scheme, including being able to interact with the REPL. A natural choice would be Emacs as I use it to write blog posts and often code in it.

Getting Scheme set up in Emacs was painful, admittedly I was looking for an install a few packages and get going and Emacs is rarely that. I decide to try Neovim. Install the Conjure package and I was good to go. I do find it funny I end up using a Vim fork to code in Scheme, something that Emacs should be the clear winner. Overall Neovim is looking pretty good and I am finding myself using it more than I expected to. Emacs has Elfeed (RSS reader) and Orgmode and they are pretty hard to replace and get daily usage from me.

Finally I am not totally convinced that setting hourly goals is healthy/productive. If I take the view of being results driven then perhaps taking the time to set results as the goal is better then time in front of the computer. That requires a little more planning in my part.

All done!