Various Updates - Aug 2017

17 August 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:

A bit too low level for myself. There’s a line between going too high level and not knowing what’s going on (hi Javascript), and being too low level that you don’t get much done. Handmade Hero isn’t even using the C standard libraries and doing the graphics rendering through the project, rendered on the CPU.
Windows only (with Visual Studio). I started by Bootcamping my Macbook, but found the constant switching between operating systems to be frustrating. I couldn’t use Mac just because of the tooling and compiling, but the code too is Windows specific (with windows.h) (at least at the start, to open a window).

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.