It's Taxes

I’ve wanted to learn more about the Rust programming language for a while. While somewhat C-like and familiar at first glance, there are several concepts and constructs that were opaque at first glance when I looked at examples of Rust code in the wild. I decided a more structured learning session would help, so I picked up a book that came out earlier this year called, aptly, The Rust Programming Language.

Since this is the official book written by members of the Rust core team, I figured this would be a good guide, and I was not disappointed. It’s a great place to start for someone like me who already has a background in programming and just wants to learn the specifics of Rust. (Though thankfully it does not assume prior knowledge of any specific programming language, so it’s still useful regardless of your exact experience.) I’m only a few chapters in, but I’m already encouraged by what this language has to offer, and I’ve had a lot of fun trying out the examples in the book and poking around at the code.

One of the topics I’ve explored with my team at work recently is design systems. When applied to web sites and mobile apps, this refers to the collection of basic components that we use to quickly and efficiently build up user interfaces. Generally at Blizzard, design is a long, bespoke process where each site or app is painstakingly crafted by hand for a particular purpose, usually to match the look and feel of one of our game franchises.

At a team level, we’ve used design systems to help rapidly develop web sites within a particular vertical. This is easily apparent in the set of corporate-themed sites that were released over the past year-and-a-half. While each site is visually distinct, if you break it down into its component parts, you’ll easily find that they’re all constructed with similar building blocks.

I originally wanted to call this post “I hate Node.js,” but that seemed a little too provocative. Also it’s not quite accurate–Node.js is a very useful product. As a fast, efficient JavaScript runtime, it does exactly what’s on the tin and fulfills a dream of being able to use the same programming language on both clients and servers of web applications. The real problem I have with Node.js is the package ecosystem. Npm is a complete mess.

To illustrate the problem, let me start with a seemingly straightforward example:

npm init
npm install gulp

It’s not unusual for me to install gulp first thing with a new project, as it’s a common tool that I like to use for the initial build pipeline for a JavaScript-based web application. This was fresh on my mind since I use gulp for building my professional web site, havisullivan.com, which I was working on the past few days. After installing just that one explicit dependency, here’s what my node_modules directory looks like:

It’s been a few months since I last wrote about Critterbits. I guess it should be obvious by now that I’m not actively working on it at the moment. Work and real life got in the way a bit, and I also kind of hit a wall on where to go next with the project. To that end, the TL;DR of this post is I’m publicly opening the repository so you can get the code if you want to play with it and build upon it. The rest of this post goes into things I learned in getting this far and what I want to do in the future.

Critterbits on GitHub: https://github.com/taxes-dev/critterbits

_©1975 Python(Monty) Pictures_

Why I wrote Critterbits

Originally, I wrote Critterbits as an educational exercise. I wanted to learn more about internals of game engines, some ruidmentary graphics programming, and C++. I’ve written software for a variety of systems over the year, from payment services to gameplay code. But I’d never dug into the internals of a game engine except on a theoretical level. It’s a subject that fascinates me and I wanted to learn more. I once heard a colleague say something along the lines of “Show me a man who is writing his own game engine, and I’ll show you a man who has never finished a game.” I can appreciate that… there’s a reason solutions like Unreal Engine and Unity3D are so popular. You can pull them off the shelf and start writing your game rather than worrying about just getting an OpenGL context started and figuring out basic frame timing. Luckily for me, the end goal was to write an engine. I really wasn’t setting out to write a real game. Yet.

Anxiety. Panic. Depression. These are words that are all too familiar. Situations and emotions that I’ve lived with all my life. I used to suffer in silence… like so many other people, I learned to smile despite the pain. I felt for years that if I admitted my weaknesses, that I would fail, that others would see in me only failure and fragility. It’s not like I just made that scenario up, either; in one particularly bad year in the late 90s, I was fired from three consecutive jobs because I couldn’t function. When I tried to explain why, I was told basically, “Get your shit together.” So I thought that was what was expected of me as an adult: get your proverbial shit together and leave your emotional baggage at home. Except… it doesn’t work like that.

via [Live Life Happy](https://www.flickr.com/photos/deeplifequotes/19271594930)