What I've been up to this past year?
Personal life
Since i last wrote anything, my wife became pregnant and i became a dad late last year. That kind of put the fun programming side work stuff on hold for a bit. Although i can say becoming a dad is probably my greatest accomplishment and i wouldn't trade the time I've spent with my family for the world. I've spent a lot of my dad time with of course the family, but also cycling and training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Getting ready for my second comp in 3 weeks. The cliche really is true that software devs love BJJ for its problem solving workspace, however i tend to bring a brute force persistent wrestling style to my rolls. The old adage rings true, "you roll like your personality".
Professional life
In my professional life, I'm still a software engineer, in the last year i managed to be promoted to a mid level engineer and aboard a bunch of reshuffling of teams I've taken on a bunch of responsibility and feature leading which have left me feeling equipped for a senior engineer role in the near future. My current job has me in the weeds with Java which has been super fun. My latest work before paternity leave, were forking a massive open source repo and converting it into something we could use to save a bunch on licensing that had been changed from under us. That was super fun, as it was one of my first forays into leading a bigger dev team. I had the privilege of seeing the project out start to end, co-coordinating across teams and architecting the rollout of this library into product. As well as working on some cloud connector work with another newer senior engineer and getting him up to speed with our ways of delivering features at my company.
Personal Projects
I'm still messing with graphics programming, I've built a few proof of concept conveyor systems in c that work, but never took it further than that. I was focused on using Sokol as my helper library but kept getting drawn to lower level stuff like OpenGL and Vulkan. Just recently i finished howtovulkan.com and feel like i have a solid understanding of the end to end pipeline of how Vulkan works.
My latest personal project is back with OpenGL, and is currently learning about shaders and all the different fun that comes with that. I've been reading out physical simulations of CRT's using shaders, as well as OpenGL 4.6 and the compute shaders that were introduced in 4.3. I'm super interested in compute shaders for parallelizing particle based simulation systems.
Closing thoughts
I thought i'd finally write something now that it's early, my kids asleep and i get some time to do some personal project work before the day starts. I think the best thing for me is that although it may not feel like much got done in my personal projects, i think professionally in this time I've come a long way. The ability to lead and organize multiple engineers to complete a complex project, was always something i assumed would be out of reach for me. However i really enjoyed it. The expectation to manage multiple streams of context were super challenging but rewarding at the same time. It leveled me up as an engineer and allowed me to perform and be more effective in my day to day work.
Hopefully my next blog isn't 1+ years away.
Until next time.