Weekly Review: Blogpost Review
04/06/15
I am writing this shortly after midnight, wherein I have gotten about four hours of sleep and my body had decided to wake up for a bit. I have read that it is actually quite normal to wake up for a bit in the middle of the night for those that have a healthy sleep schedule. So, I don't want to fight this phenomenon, but I do want to be productive during this hour or so that it apparently normally lasts (though, I already feel like going back to sleep).
And so, as the title suggests, I will be doing a bit of my planned weekly review during this bit of time. Specifically, if my brain can be active enough, I will read through my posts for the past two weeks.
External Distraction: Dog is whining.
Diary Post Review
Game Dev Game Jam Invitation Talk Prep (03/23/15)
I didn't really end up using much of this script, but it was good mental preperation for talking to the class. It reminds me a bit of the script I prepared when I went and talked at my old high school. Talking in front of people about things is a skill I would like to continue to build.
Building Plan (03/23/15)
This was a kinda in-depth plan that I guess I should work on having again, especially for my days off of work. Lots of quality thinking about what I want to do, why, and in what order I should do it in and why.
Plan Document (03/23/15)
This was when I still put my whol activity inventory in each plan document. I'm glad I try to only put relevant items in there now.
UA Game Dev Javascript Talk Prep (03/23/15)
Unlike the script planning above, this prep was incredibly valuable and actually used during the talk. It also covered the beginning only, wherein I winged it from there. Though I had a backup directory of a working game to show off if I couldn't quite develop at the speed I wanted. I ended up using it at the very end.
Weekly Review (03/23/15)
This was a quick weekly review on the bus, and it shows. Though, it still gets the job done, mostly. I guess a poor weekly review is still significantly better than none at all. That makes me wonder... do I gain enough out of a poor weekly review such that a proper one is overkill? I'm inclined to think no, but perhaps that's incorrect.
Review (03/23/15)
Getting good at starting is smart, but I was too quick to dismiss getting good at finishing. As I point out in this review, I start and finish a blogpost most everyday. Might as well work towards starting and finishing other projects in a similar fashion. It's staying on one thing too long that is the problem. But not finishing would be a bad habit to start.
Review (03/24/15)
Deciding to do end-of-day reviews less was a good idea, it has, in fact, opened up my time to proper projects. I should still work on properly doing my morning and end of day routines, though.
Impress.js: The Beginning Draft (03/28/15)
This was a pretty cool post. It looks like a really short post in the diary area, but going to its page, it's actually a series of slides. The slides aren't styled at all, however. It's something I'll need to learn to do.
Development Tools Improvement: Vim Setup (03/28/15)
This was a short post alluding to me trying to clean up my hacked vimrc setups. It ended up taking a lot of time and I don't think it made any of the things I made that much more usable. I have decided to instead retreat into the pure, literal string representations of my vim macros for now. Functions need only be created when I need the same functionality regularly.
End of Day Review (03/29/15)
This review contained an interesting attempt to list all of my tickler items for the day. It's actually something that could end up very valuable if I got into the habit and made it pretty quick. It also translates well into making them proper pomodoro items in my plan and log documents. Definitely an idea that's worth returning to.
UA Game Dev Club Meeting (03/30/15)
This was me trying to take notes during the meeting. Taking notes of meetings and things where I'm a passive participant is something I wish to cultivate. Notes really help capture what I'm getting out of something, and help reveal what I want to get out of it, which motivates strats to bridge the gap between the two.
Weekly Review (03/30/15)
I ended up skipping the majority of the review to work on tools to make my weekly review more manageable. I think this was the right decision, though I've only managed to create one such helper script.
External Distraction: Rosse needed me to call her phone
That one helper script is quite valuable though, as it set up all these links for me, and so I'm using the work-in-progress post to go and read the documents-of-interest. Further, I think the script's code will be valuable for future script building. The beginning of a library? Hopefully.
Also, emptying my notebook helped make a few blog posts this week. Definitely getting value out of my weekly reviews.
End of Day Review (03/30/15)
A list of reasons I organize things the way I do would actually be quite valuable.
External Distraction: Rosse needs help getting Xanthum Gum out
I also still need to organize things into more finely defined bins.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (03/31/15)
The beginning of my building my weekly review init scripts! Took about a week to get to the script I'm using now. Still lots of things to do with it, but it's usable for now.
I managed to get a basic introduction to cheerio on this post, which was the necessary beginning to what I desired.
It also looked like I didn't quite figure out code formatting at this point. Oh well.
End of Day Review (03/31/15)
Reusing plans was a good idea.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/01/15)
I managed to count my blogposts this post, and properly feed in a file as a commandline argument.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/02/15)
I didn't really know how to do things with cheerio. I managed to peer into the Readme.md that comes with cheerio, and just played with the various functions to see what I could use to do what I wanted. It turned out that my thinking on synchronous vs. asynchronous was not needed.
I managed to get all the posts since a certain date during this exploration. Another powerful step towards something useful.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/03/15)
I forgot to format the code again, so it's all ugly again. I need to make a macro that does it correctly. Let's fix my formatting.
Fixed.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/04/15)
And so my script finally comes into form, getting the main functionality I desired. Starting over worked out pretty well here.
End of Day Review (04/05/15)
Doing some various long-term planning stuff for my site: DRYing it up, CSS improvements, and then working on a personalized site-blocking tool that reminds me what I want to be working on instead of just blocking my work.
Though, actually working on CSS and stuff will probably be a ways away, as I want to prioritize review-writing again soon.
Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init (04/05/15)
In which I finish what I'd been working on, and have something I have already used to help me out. It's not perfect and saying I "finished" it is a bit inaccurate, but it's still a satisfying bit of code to finally have for use.
Diary Final Thoughts
The diary is perhaps becoming a place where I draft out functional pieces that will become long blog posts detailing some accomplishment. I still need to improve it as my means of planning my extracurricular activities, but this extra property is nice emergent behavior.
I will probably work on making the various Personal System Iterate: Weekly Review Init posts into one long blog post featuring my node learnings and my small accomplishment that opens up the doorway to greater things, I think.
Blog Post Review
Death Note Fanfic Outline (03/23/15)
This is actually a pretty good outline of my initial thinking on a Death Note rewrite. I didn't quite get to all the content I was thinking of, but outlining a three-way battle early on feels pretty interesting to me.
And I do, in fact, really love three-way battles. Well, the more the better, though I'm sure at some point it gets too convoluted. There's probably some perfect number of colliding motivations.
Magical Mundane (03/24/15)
This is another post I'm glad I wrote. I also can't help but continue thinking about "the Gamer", and how much I would find a perfectly ordinary existence skewed by a literal RPG interface.
I am super considering going ahead and copying this idea and going with it. I am also considering making an idle game out of this very idea, "Give the real world an RPG interface!"
It's an idea I'll keep on the back burner for a while.
Frozen Shouldn't Have a Bad Guy (03/25/15)
Something that's been on my mind for a while, and something I had alluded to talking about a long time ago. I think this small change could've really improved my opinion of the movie. Which is saying something, because I still quite enjoy the movie.
Vim: Functions (03/26/15)
This was a pretty good post showing off my growing vim-fu that may or may not be of use to other people exploring vim. I liked that I properly incorporated pictures and stuff. Really gives the post a nice composition.
Functional Javascript? (03/27/15)
A short and sweet post wherein I explore my own understanding of programming concepts and languages. It'll probably be worth revisting once my knowledge grows again.
UA Game Jam! (03/28/15)
I finally did some proper thinking about how to go about making first steps to a fantasy of mine: making a game-making game. The fantasy has a lot of properties, none of which are currently real. Making a game in impress.js does actually feel like a strong start in the right direction. As the post says, I gotta start somewhere.
Impress.js; The Beginning Draft (03/29/15)
A lazy repost of my diary post. It felt like a worthy blog post and I find reposting from my diary to be acceptable. It would've been proper to pretty it up a bit more, though.
Modular Development Environment (03/30/15)
This has led to me being introduced to some MDEs, so already worth the post. I also just like the post overall. It either reveals my ignorance or shouts about something that maybe should exist.
FindReplace.js is Back (03/31/15)
My return to javascripting! I'm really glad I did this, though I could have made a similar thing with a combination of good commandline tools. Again, it's something that, when combined with other things, may lead to transforming my site to a dynamic node setup instead of a static nginx setup. Even if it is ultimately throwaway code, it's throwaway code that will have a lasting effect on the direction of this site.
Hopefully, it was also a good learning experience in its own right.
Iterating My System (04/01/15)
I got to my script, but I didn't make the other things I mentioned, which was a place for all the things I need. Maybe I'll make time for it during my proper weekly review after this blog review stuff.
Training Everyday Plan (04/02/15)
This is the beginning of some longterm thinking about self-improvement. After blog-writing, I'm pretty sure I'll be doing drawing. After drawing, maybe music? I don't know, it's a long ways away.
Javascript: Cheerio and the Return of jQuery (04/03/15)
I'm thinking a return to jQuery will actually be quite useful. There's some cool things in there.
CSS Digging Deeper (04/04/15)
This is a plan I'm happily anticipating. Unforntunately, I'm a ways away from implementing it, I think. I may have to reconsider how much of a priority I want to give reading.... Or writing reviews. I could always get a book on css and/or graphic design and kill two birds with one stone.
Hmmm.... I don't know. Maybe I just really need to work on having more productive time per day to do all the things I want to do.
Vim: Tags (04/05/15)
This was kind've a lazy post. I didn't really show the strength of vim tags too much. Part of the problem is I use them almost exclusively at work. It did help me realize that maybe I should look into similar tools for developing in javascript or even python.
Diary Reposts (04/06/15)
It's here that I decide to let diary posts build up as fodder for longer posts. It lets me publish lots of diary posts about a concept, and also have a lot of content that I can modify into a larger, more-polished without the additional cost of creating all that content up front before publishing, and also while keeping the content in proper, bite-sized pieces.
It also adds another positive trait to my diary at no additional cost.
Diary Thoughts
I'm pretty excited to see useful content coming out of my diary. It makes me think that maybe I should be posting rough review stuff here in the diary instead of slowly making a review that I will heavily edit over and over.
Actually, yeah, I'm going to start putting review material together in my diary. Thanks for inspiration on that, diary.