Sometimes, working overtime and trying to juggle adulting responsibilities, I get the need to play mindless video games. Diablo II was one of my entry games that would start a good era of gaming-as-a-hobby-slash-gaming-as-a-second-job. I could have gotten the Diablo III (D3) expansion as I’ve read it made D3 fun to play like D2 was. Or I could go through my library of bundle games and play R.A.W. Realms of Ancient War (RAW). For a hack-n-slash/aRPG/dungeon crawler, it’s not a bad game. It’s not a good game, either.

I was inspired to play Pillars of Eternity (PoE) after listening to the Critical Role podcast and hearing them advertise Pillars of Eternity 2 as they had done voices for the game. Luckily, I snatched up a copy with Twitch Prime about a year ago. I’m roughly half way through the main quests with no intention of doing the White March campaign unless I accidentally get into it. My attention span is short enough with games these days and it’s a miracle to play more than a couple of hours.

Work has not so subtly hinted that the developers learn Go. To get familiar with the rather odd syntax (e.g., declaring the type after a variable name, or square brackets followed by the type for an array) and to have something in place for migrating customers from an older version of software, I wrote a script in Go to read through XML and reformat properties of interest into JSON. Not bad. Then I found an article explaining a Sudoku solver written in Python and I figured why not, let’s implement it in Go. Bad idea.

I find great irony in writing a script on a Saturday (a day off) that resembles the functionality I have been working on for the past ~3 years. I didn’t attend Microsoft Build this year so I didn’t receive a paper printout of all of the sessions. I wasn’t able to find a PDF version. What I did instead was a little bit of manual work and a short snippit of NodeJS scripting to generate an Excel file for my own use to keep track of what videos I’ve watched. Total time: < 1 hr.

I often dream of getting into a long story-driven game like I used to as a kid, but life tends to get in the way. I lose interest just a few minutes into a game. Or I get a good rhythm going, but something happens and I generally lose interest in continuing (like Microsoft Build and Stardew Valley). Something makes me put a game down and I don’t have the drive to continue. But for some reason, Divinity: Original Sin was able to keep its hooks in me until close to the end, although I rushed through the last fights so I could claim finishing it. I even re-rolled a couple of new characters to start a replay, though I haven’t revisited it in a couple of weeks because … life.

My second (ish) professional conference. I was lucky enough to attend Microsoft Build and learn that I am way behind in my knowledge and grasp of current technologies. I am probably naively thinking I am not too far behind, but I’ve got to start the catching-up process at some point…preferably now.

This post will be a mix of mostly vacation text (sightseeing) and a little bit of conference text as I like to log my travels outside of the local area. Plus, I was in desperate need of a trip/vacation away from home, family, and work as I could tell the feeling of burn out was starting.

Being a Starbucks reward member, I get a free drink on my birthday. I didn’t make use of it often enough in the past, but I found I can take a brisk walk to the nearby Starbucks to pick up my drink and be back in the office in ~30 minutes. Usually I try a new espresso drink when I get a free treat, but since I try to save coffee for Fridays, I went for tea.

I finished a LINQ course on Pluralsight and the author mentioned Advent of Code. Curious, I went to check it out and found it is similar to Project Euler — short programming problems to solve in an open-ended way such that if you want to practice a new language, problem solving skills, etc., it’s a good platform for that. I’ve only looked at 2015’s Day 1 problem so far, but while thinking about my initial solution, I came up with a second solution, then wondered if it could be improved on. Eventually I ended up back at my first solution.

I found it an interesting process that I decided it was worth writing about.

My first professional conference that I was actually registered for was Visual Studio LIVE (I was invited to crash the Agile Open at UCI a couple weeks ago at the behest of my manager to participate in a coding dojo). I was only able to go two of the three days as my team needed me back for quarterly planning. I thought it was a good conference. There was a lot of information to take in, but nothing directly related to my current project so it wasn’t overwhelming with information and a new zeal to try everything I saw or research this and that like hack.summit. But it was still amusing to hear how .NET Core is cross-platform at almost every talk I went to.

(Cross-posted at Across Moon River)

I was eyeing Exercises in Programming Style (EPS) for a while, but I wasn’t sure if I wanted to get it in hardcopy or ebook format. I took a class and did some research with the author, Crista Lopes, when I was a grad student so getting a hardcopy signed would have been pretty neat. I registered for an agile conference at my alma mater and that led to my decision to purchase the hardcopy, but turns out I’m not being allowed to go. :( With the book in my possession regardless, I read through it.

I quickly found that it’s not a book that you read through once, but a text to revisit often. This entry is about my first read through and I hopefully will read through it again and write another entry, perhaps with new insights. I think my initial read was more of a surface level exposure to concepts and revisiting the book later, perhaps doing some of the exercises or just reading the Python code instead of glancing through it, will ingrain or connect the theory to practice.