Blogging on a Time Budget

I've never been regular in writing blog posts, and in the past years I never found the time necessary to do serious Magic programming. I enjoy thinking about general ways to model the Magic rules in a program, but without a serious amount of time, it will always remain tinkering. It's an interest, but not serious enough to resolve to put out thousands of lines of code to make it work.

However, I'm still a passionate programmer and learner. While most of my posts so far have had a Magic context, they were always about programming. And this is where I want to shift the focus: non-MtG posts aren't off-topic, and that should encourage me to write more about what I'm currently doing. I know I won't start spewing out post after post, but as long as I find the time, I shouldn't run out of topics.

So what have I learned about in the three years since my last blog post?

I have shortly continued with Scala, but got demotivated by the compile times. A lot of time was spent working with Python, and it's currently my most fluent language. I have written web applications with Django, learned about generators and async/await, and constructed protocols and servers using ZeroMQ.

There has also been a considerable amount of JavaScript and some TypeScript, mostly using Vue.js to create reactive frontends for my web applications. I have also looked at web-technologies, such as Webpack and, although briefly, Websockets, PWAs (particularly service workers) and WebAssembly.

Recently, I re-discovered Rust after playing with it years ago. In terms of languages-to-use-if-you-want-to-get-things-done-in-a-reasonable-amount-of-time, Rust is about as far away from Python and JS as you can get (yes, there's also C and C++, but I don't think they're farther away, just slightly worse at getting things done... just my opinion though).

I intend to write about most of these things, if they're still relevant when I get around to them. If there be still readers here, let me know with what to start.

Oh, and I have watched tons of programming videos on YouTube! There's lots of great content. But there are also videos that suffer from what I call "boring tutorial syndrome": they try to teach good programming style (or something), but actually don't go far beyond how to write an idiomatic Hello World program (or whatever the basics of the respective topic are). The problem is that by starting from scratch, these tutorials don't manage to reach a reasonable depth. So whatever I write, don't expect start-at-zero tutorials, expect food for thought and self-study!

PS: if you're looking for videos that don't suffer from the boring-tutorial-syndrome, try LiveOverflow