To mix things up a bit I am going to attempt to set out a plan for the month of June 2021. After doing some time tracking I determined I work roughly 40hrs a month on personal projects. Using this I figured I would divide my time as such:
- Small platform game. This will initially reworking it to use Rust. 20hrs
- At least one blog post (this one counts). 4hrs
- Twitter (1hr) Basically start using it in an interactive way. So start tweeting rather than consuming. (mostly done in dead time so only 1 hr)
- Study for 10hrs.
- Experiment with code 5 hours.
Giving a total of 40hrs. I consider this a commitment to do all those things. Of course once you start to use a metric as a primary measure it gets altered. The hours have to be good hours not me sat at my desk pretending to work.
After talking about Rust in the last post I ended up spending the week with C. I really like C even though every feature it has seems to be done better elsewhere. I think as whole it fits mostly in your brain and has a simplicity that really appeals. C++ and Rust don't really have that vibe.
Without the need to look things up and the way to mostly do things is obvious it means you can focus on the task at hand. The concept of a function is a fundamental abstract and it can take you a long way.
After a run, then some thinking and probably another run I realised it's the feeling the C gives that appeals. Fast iteration times and the ability to focus on the problem rather than the language makes it fun, in a sugary rave like way. That probably doesn't make sense but I will try to not edit out this paragraph. Neither Rust or C++ give me that feeling.
To be fair Rust has not been given a clean shot at it as I have not interned many of its ideas. C++ you have had decades - Sorry. So I am going to give Rust a fair shot at it.
It is not unreasonable to say I am terrible at social media. Well I consume a lot of it but really it is meant to be used interactively and that's where I fail. This month I am going to focus on twitter and attempt to actually tweet more than once and perhaps even interact!
Study is something everyone should do. I have a book on Scheme that I want to dive deeply into so I suspect that is where the time will be spent. This should be be pretty intense with 100% focus.
Finally I put in 5 hrs for fun investigation. Perhaps it will be miniquad or perhaps just something else that comes up. No commitment to turning it into proper project. This similar to the Study task except more relaxed and more about scouting out a landscape of a library rather than in depth study.
40 hours is not a great amount of time over the period of a month. So I am going to be doing a bit of profiling and seeing where my time is being spent. Much of it is not movable but perhaps I can shave a few hours off less fun topics with a few habit changes.
Yes specifying a goal of one blog post and then posting about goals for the month is cheating. It lets me get a motivation win!
So I was thinking about Flipcode.com and honestly missing it a bit. I used to love reading those gamedev articles. Sure some were not top quality. I don't really know of a similar site these days, it is a bit of a shame really. Yep this is related to the previous post about the early blogging days.
I feel like I should discuss the 40 hours a bit. I have been measuring the hours I have worked on personal projects every month of this year. 40 hours is not the average more just an eyeball at the values and something to work with.
At some level it is lower than I was expecting but deliberately haven't thought about the number much until now. I wanted to get a base line. There are a number of factor that I think suppress the value and if I am honest they mostly come down to not sleeping enough.
Sleeping more seem to be the logical conclusion but for some reason that is easier said than done. I guess I am gradually ramping up my fitness from a fairly low state putting even more pressure on actually getting some good sleep.
40 hours as a number should also inform what is reasonable to attempt as projects. No point embarking on a 1000 hr project if I am wanting to get it done in a 5 months. Although accepting it as a long term project is fine.
If public goal setting proves to be useful I shall attempt to do this every month. I quite like the idea of a productivity post each month where I review how the previous month went, Set new goals for the coming month and finally discuss things I am trying.