Spring Break Hackathon Postmortem
With Saturday ending in disaster since I got found out by my father that I been coding late at night, this effectively end my experiment. Although I didn’t achieve what I originally intended, I did actually end up achieving the 28 hours work week. If it was has goes as planned, I would actually be clocking in 36 hours at the end of spring break. So I am going to have to say that I achieve my goal, nonetheless.
The 4 hours time box is a well tested concept. It served me well in ensuring high productivity. The problem is actually the time that I choose to code. Coding at night is a bad idea, especially if you’re under 18 and still live with your parents. So coding at night eventually backfire once my father discovered my activity. Thus, I spent my Sunday relaxing. For what it is worth, the hackathon is worthy of every single seconds that I put into it.
I found unit testing to be an immensefully useful tool in writing razor sharp percise code and also help me integrate new code very gracefully. The tradeoff is time spent on unit testing. However, the physic profit is will worth the cost.
My greatest achievement of this week is the release of RubyTet and more importantly, the development and cleanup of the codebase behind rubytet. The game logics is preserved but the way the game work is reworked, leading to a very awesome codebase.
Projects like space fighter ace just keep getting stucks in development. Although I fixed a camera bug at the beginning, I didn’t get much progress writing the actual physics of the game because of the lack of understanding of vectors. The movement code is broken because it doesn’t move smoothly. However, I was able to largely modernize the game’s eventqueue to Rubygame 2.4. I did this modernization effort for all my projects as well. The only issue I have is learning how to handle mouse events.
I started one new project called git-downloader. However, for the most part, it is stuck. I wasn’t able to make much progress in pulling gits repoistory The other hard part is creating the actual web application code to present the downloads. I didn’t get to the creating website part but I was able to learn a little bit how the templating work. Packaging a game is the easy part since I have experience with using FileUtils. I wasn’t able to get to that part too because of problems with using git.
Rbgooey on the other hand is well in development stage. I wrote an example application to shows how the library will work. The work is mostly rewriting of managing the various UI in rbgooey. There is a lot of old unit tests but some of them are useful and some are not. So I been working through them and weeding, modifying, cleaning as needed.
Other stuff I was working on is the rubygame tutorial book. All I did there was to update the eventqueue code to be up-to-date.
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