c-sharp

Ludum Dare is a twice-yearly game jam where people around the world make games over a weekend. The 50th jam happened earlier this month, with the theme of, “Delay the inevitable”. I’ll talk about my game in a bit. But first, a moment on why I enjoy game jams. My personal projects typically start in a few forms: either attempting to build some well crafted, well designed system that I’ll never finish, a simple setup to learn about a library or technique, or a prototype to explore a game concepts....

The web is an interesting and excited place to develop for. However, the ecosystem of Javascript, and even Typescript, are not pleasant. Everything is always in flux, from the libraries to the tooling. A hot new thing springs up every other day, and frameworks get abandoned just as quickly. In my experience, I spend more than half my time fighting the tool chain and not understanding how anything works. This is why I am excited about Webassembly and Blazor – Microsoft’s C#-backed solution to create web apps....

I often hear this suggestion that engineers early in their career should work on side projects to show off. Until you try, it’s difficult to realize how hard it is to do that. From balancing work and life, to coming up with ideas, to finding the motivation, it is many times harder than anything I approach at work. For me, personal projects are a creative outlet and a way to learn new things....