Ramamble I shouldn’t bother reading…

Learning is an odd thing. I really struggle to get things into my mind. Well some things. Short term. I recall asking for a train ticket once and I returned about three times to get the platform number. I’ve always struggled with my brain. I may have been drunk at that point, but it’s the same effect. I find I can be the same sober.

I find my family often think they know what’s best for me. But the thing is, they can’t. When it comes to learning I don’t know what works best for me, but I do know I feel more stable absorbing huge amounts of information from Udemy and then reusing it when I need it. I suppose there are downsides and upsides to this.

The downsides. You question whether you’re in what seems to have become called tutorial hell amongst developers. It can feel like hell. I don’t enjoy most of it. But I really do learn. I find I don’t end up coding something in a naïve way initially, and one could argue that that’s a good way to learn, but having an approach before you’ve got started because you’ve been shown, I like it. I think it helps you to design things in your mind. Though it’s also true that my portfolio is almost all websites and I’d rather be doing more interesting things. I thought WordPress would just be handy.

Another downside is that information evaporates or becomes irrelevant. WordPress I am led to believe has stayed the same for some time. The guts of it. There’s a new way to build themes I believe, blocks and full site editing? Something like that. But the tutor says if you want to do anything substantial and custom then you still need the traditional stuff. But you know…I find knowledge sticks. It builds some elements of a neural network, and it’s easier to learn stuff later on if you’ve already done the groundwork. Oh I don’t know. I am learning for the sake of it. But maybe it’ll turn out to be like the groundwork I’d put in before my degree with my C++ book and all worth it in the end.

I did a fifty two hour course in React. It was a lot of sitting through videos. Somehow I feel quite confident that I could build an app now, though. I’d have to use JavaScript as opposed to NativeScript, but who cares. If I need that I’ll learn that too. After all, it just looked like JavaScript with types and generics and all that stuff and I quite liked all that stuff in Java. iOS? I could build an app in that too. Android? Sure. It’s not alien to me. Need an API backend? I can do that in Laravel. Not got to NodeJS yet. So I feel like I could probably write anything, 3D graphics aside although I’d give it a good go. Speaking of which there are games libraries for iOS and Android, but not there yet. But I could build an app with a cloud backend and most clients aren’t going to want 3D or 2D stuff anyway. I’m okay with my learning at the moment.

I suppose I covered the upsides just now. For me it’s about confidence. If a client comes to me with a “Can you do this?” question I like to know that I can. Otherwise it’s impossible to estimate time. It’s impossible to feel confident. You just shove yourself into a situation which you may end up feeling stuck in. ECommerce can wait though. I don’t like it and I’m not doing anymore WordPress for a long time after this course.

The other benefit of it is that in my, what I can only assume is ME, tired state, it’s something I’m able to do. I’m able to better my knowledge of things.

I don’t feel like I’ve achieved anything with my life and my plan is to gather enough knowledge so that so many things are piss easy because I’ve got knowledge that I can make lots of money. “It’s not about the money!” tell that to someone who has no money at all. Well, the government help me with the essentials, and I’ll never be homeless or hungry, so in many ways I am rich, but in other ways, well. I ain’t got no spending money. I don’t think that’s a bad thing to aspire to.

I might be weird. But when I was young, college age, I’d study my C++ book deeply. I studied it for years. Every tiny word. The later revisions, unfortunately, are a bit wonky on the English and with that kind of thing you have to be precise. And I don’t know why I did it. I remember writing syntax with my hand and in my brain at night. Just concepts, you know, I’m not rain man, writing chess in my brain or something, but just getting precise syntax. Fuck. I need a life. Conversely I was also getting very drunk every weekend for decades. Hardly cool, but maybe it took the edge of what a repulsive geek I was. I didn’t have a reason to learn from that book, but there are a couple of reasons I have a degree.

The first is studying that book. It allowed me to adjust to Java and JavaScript and also use C++ itself for games coding in University. The other reason is because I’m a christing weirdo. For my games development course, the exam was approaching, and I decided that since I was ill, that I would just do what I could in the way of revision. This turned out to be memorising pages and pages of 3D maths theory and it included memorising formulas for the calculation of the light of a pixel from a particular point in 3D space. I’m a fraud! I don’t think I deserved that degree. Mind you, I’d quite like to go back and do another one.

I don’t work for the good of other people. Other people are parasites. And so am I. I would love to work to help people, in reality, or animals, but since jobs or contracts like that don’t just appear you need a more selfish motive. I like creating something and seeing it work. And I especially liked graphics coding because there are no operating systems to be seen let alone web browsers.

My plan is to go back to DirectDraw and build a game. Outdated it may be, but it’s a start. “Just do things the easy way!” people say. But if you learn to create 2D or 3D games starting from nothing but pixel plotting, and a blitter of course, you will learn how to use any 3D engine this world can throw at you. Even if you can’t you’ll understand the theory and if you can’t use the engine I’d blame the creators of that engine. The game? Point and click? Something else in an enormous list of things I want to do but don’t have enough life to do is the artwork. This shit takes time. Music, three instruments, singing, writing, drawing, coding different stuff. Frankly coding is at the bottom of my list. But I also need to get paid.

One more section before we learn about deployment and then a few extra bits in a ten minute module. Then it’s plugins and combining them with React. I’m hoping that’ll be interesting enough to keep me entertained. The plan is to build a plugin that allows the user to connect to Stripe so that each individual can go to a document shop link. Then they’ll see their list of documents and they’ll be able to either view them or purchase them. It’s what one client wanted but they disappeared. I don’t like that. “Would you be interested in doing this?” Then they fuck off! I wouldn’t mind but I need the money. I do wonder if my prices are too high for new customers, especially given that people often just go to someone on freelancer.com who’ll do it for about 300 quid. I couldn’t afford to do it for 300 quid. Even a one page site takes longer than a few days because you have to nail down the design, the assets, the basic theme building, the contact form hooking up, tweaks for responsiveness. I find things take more like three months but that’s assuming you’re not starting from a position of having absolutely everything to hand. If you did…technically you could probably be done in a week.

Something I am interested in is running DirectDraw games on the Steam Deck. Would it work? You can run old games on it. I want to create stuff and run it on there. That would be cool.

I am to visit the family soon. I get extremely edgy coming out of my box.

I am getting tired. I will run. Tomorrow…maybe tomorrow I could finish another module. That said I struggle to get out of bed until four or five. Maybe tomorrow I’ll rise at 8 and stay up feeling like shit as the clock’s gone again…

Plans are required. How the hell am I going to make money? I can’t say I’m interested in jobs when I can’t stay awake, I can’t even do the job interview.

Be positive. Insight. An app. Lots of meditation audio. I find it relaxing…