Whoooeeeee, life sure can change big time in just a few months!
I am now a 9-5 (well, 7.30-4) c++ programmer working in a team of around 100+ people around the world on a project with millions of lines of code. I work in a large open plan office with about 50+ other people, about half of whom are programmers – really, really good programmers. This is of course quite a change in lifestyle compared with casually knocking out code whenever you feel like it at the dining room table, and it initially caused some amount of culture shock. But I’m slowly getting used to it I think…
The coding is interesting and challenging and it looks like we’re given a great deal of latitude when it comes to solving problems – although I’ve really only just been given my first ‘assignment’ so we’ll see what they think of my particular solutions. The other programmers here are complete c++ heads, just like me, and we get to use the more modern variant of c++, c++11, which is much nicer than olde c++. We also get to use the Qt framework which I like a lot and did in fact inspire monkey2’s design somewhat.
There is also a massive GIT setup here, and updating the project is kind of a pain in the ass, involving branching, pull requests, code reviews and so on. No doubt this is pretty much the norm’ these days but I’m still getting used to it. There are quite a few steps involved and if you forget one of them, your change just sits there doing nothing. Anyway, I know a LOT more about GIT now than I used to and am just about over my past GIT-phobic tendancies. GIT really is easier than it seems and I might write up my own little explainer one day.
So, so far, so good, although it’s also been kind of exhausting. I really haven’t had the energy to do much monkey2-ing in the evenings, which leaves the weekends but so far I’ve been doing stuff that I’d normally do during the week, surprise surprise, welcome to the real world Sibly!
But I have at least been thinking about monkey2 and I did actually get a few little bugfixes and tweaks done, so I’m going to put together a 2018-08 release if nothing else just to sort of keep things rolling. Nerobot has also kindly updated the ted2go master branch so that’ll be in there too.
I’ve decided to leave patreon off for at least another month too, as I’m still not sure how much time I’m gonna be able to put into monkey2 in the near future. Longer term, once I get used to my ‘new life’ a bit, I do plan to get back into monkey2. Plans here include adding a Vulkan driver for the forthcoming ios-pocalypse of apple’s deprecating of opengl, but also of course ‘coz it’s (supposedly) faster on modern GPUs.
Anyway, sorry I can’t be more enlightening on the monkey2 front, and sorry I haven’t been more involved in the monkey2 communities lately, but it really has been an intense couple of months for someone who hasn’t worked a real job in >30 years! Semi-normal service will hopefully be resumed shortly.
Bye!
Mark
ps: v2018.08 can be found here:
https://blitzresearch.itch.io/monkey2
I loved this news, the compilation time as well as products like BlitzMax, Blitz3D, although it is a great job focused on advanced programming, I think most users want things easy, fast, elegant, that accelerate productivity.
Good luck.