Various Updates - Aug 2017

Been working on a few things lately. So just a quick update.

Portfolio

Updated to the latest version of Gatsby (1.8.4), a React static site generator. I don’t see too many benefits of the updates for my needs, but there is some promising work coming out of it. I also added a couple of projects that I’ve done over the past few months.

C

I’ve been learning C. Yep, I’m going low level.

I never took a CS course so I’m learning a lot through it. At first I started with the Handmade Hero series by Casey Muratori. I learnt an intro to C through there but decided against it in the end for a few reasons:

I’ve decided to build something and not follow a course religiously like Handmade Hero or something on Coursera/EDX/Udemy etc. The route I’ve decided to start with is graphics.

Graphics + OpenGL

This is tough. I’m back to school learning trigonometry, back to the point where I am relearning Pythagoras’ theorem, matrices and the sin, cos and tan trig functions. I’m somewhat following this tutorial, but coming away from it at times to learn some C or maths or do something else.

I’ve been using OpenGL using the GLFW and STB libraries. You can check out the stuff I’ve been doing here: https://github.com/oliverbenns/c-graphics.

So I’ve gone from learning a little bit of C to learning full blown mathematics and rendering. But that’s ok, it’s something new and enjoyable, even though it takes so long to render much to the screen.

Expo + React Native

I’ve been doing a lot of React Native stuff recently. Expo is a new tool to help deploying apps a lot easier. It’s been a joy to use, though I had to create a simple deployment Bash script to switch between environments, which seems to be being used by other developers: oliverbenns/expo-deploy. I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before Expo resolve this themselves.