I’ll keep this light this year. Professionally, a strange and difficult year. But at least I still have a job, so I’m grateful for that.

Beyond the job though, I did do some fun coding projects.

Probably the biggest was my raytracing journey. I’ve never been super interested in that kind of photo-realistic rendering from an artistic viewpoint. But working through the books and creating the renderer itself was the most fun I’ve had coding in ages. Of course, once it was sufficiently “complete”, I kind of lost interest in it. It didn’t really change the basic fact that 3D stuff is not what I’m really interested in creatively. That said, I’ll probably play with it some more in the future. My original thinking was to do some kind of generative stuff that could then be rendered in 3D. But “generative” fairly often means lots of individually created units interacting in some way – at least the way I usually do generative. so it can get expensive rendering hundreds or thousands of objects. I might need to look more into optimizing the engine – I skipped that chapter in the book!

Other than that, I created a few vim plugins. One of which, bufkill, I use on a regular basis and really love. I made a few others, but none that were really worth talking about too much. During my plugin-writing phase, I also did a lot of upgrading of my neovim setup, switching my whole config to use Lua, and dropping Conquer of Completion in favor of neovim’s built-in LSP system for completion and syntax checking. That was a lot of work, but I’m happy with the result.

And of course, I started the Coding Curves series, which I’m still really excited about. As I said in the initial post, this was a book that I’ve wanted to write for years. I finally came to the conclusion that I was not going to sit down and write it from start to finish, but writing each chapter as a blog post was way more doable. I banged out ten “chapters” so far and they’ve been pretty well received. I’m taking a short break, but will be back to do the rest before too long. Most of what’s left I already have lots of code and examples written for, and a lot of the explanations are kind of half written in my head already.

I haven’t put out a lot of creative-code artwork this year, but in the last few weeks I’ve been working hard to upgrade my personal code libraries. I currently use a couple of libraries of my own in every creative coding project I do: blcairo which is the drawing api with a ton of custom rendering routines, and bitlib which has math, geometry, color, a PRNG, noise, and other various utilities I use all the time. I love this library and I’ve added a lot to it in recent months.

Oh, and I quit Twitter. I fully deleted my account and set up a new private account with the old user name just to keep anyone from taking it over and impersonating me. It was tough to walk away from 8,000 followers, but every time I see the toxic mess that the platform has become, I have zero regrets. Find me now at https://mstdn.social/@bit101. I remain very happy with Mastodon.

Plans for 2023

There are a few things I want to do in the new year.

• Create my own interpreted language. A while back I got the book Writing an Interpreter in Go and worked partway through it. It’s quite good and I want to do more with this. My idea would be a simple interpreted language that would depend on my own Go libraries as described above. This would probably just be for my own education and personal use. I don’t have a lot of interest in supporting a language in the wild.
• I want to finally do something with music. At this stage in life, I doubt I will ever learn any kind of instrument, but I have enjoyed doing stuff with electronic music on and off over the years. I’m currently messing around with MilkyTracker, which reminds me of playing with mod trackers back in my Amiga years. I know trackers are kind of toys, but that’s all I’m really looking for now. Something to play with and have fun and maybe learn a bit. Eventually I might like to dip my toes into musical hardware, synths, sequencers, etc. Anyway, one of my goals will be to release a song in 2023. “Release a song” sounds way more serious than I mean it to sound. I will create a song and put it on my web site and hopefully it won’t suck too much (but, fair warning, it probably will). If anyone has any advice or resources for learning this stuff, let me know.
• I’d love to do another side project creating graphics for something. My last big projects were back in 2018. I’m open for projects!
• Of course, I’ll finish the Coding Curves project. Probably in January or February. I’m toying with the idea of a similarly structured project with a different subject, tba.