Year 6
I've been posting on this blog for 5 full years now. At first it was almost every week, then a few times a month, then every month. Now this.
I think my last year can be gleamed from my GitHub commit history. Starting from 2014.
In 2014 I was in the second half of my sophomore year and in the first half of my middler year, I was working on Twixel, a Twitch.TV API library and Windows store app, my roommates and I made a quotes website for one of our parties, and I created GLX, a MonoGame library that I later used in my Capstone project senior year. The crazy thing about GLX is that some of the code comes from a XNA library that I made back in 2010. 2014 was also the year I really started using GitHub, Twixel's first commit was in December of 2013, I created my GitHub account in June of 2012 and the only other code thing I had put on the internet was on CodePlex in 2010.
2015 included Attention Passengers, the release of Twixel on the store 7 months after I had started working on it, some school projects, the start of my first VSCode extension, and the YHackSlackPack.
2016 marked another hackathon project, the birth of botbot (a useless Slack bot), the box (a LED light box that responds to music, which I wanted to build since 2014, and I plan to remake it this year), more school projects, the beginnings of HackBeanpot 2016, and my first commits to Signal for Windows.
The first half of 2017 was mainly marked by my Capstone project, that used GLX, but I also built another music visualizer, and a SMS based board game for a class. Then in the end of May/the beginning of June I moved to Seattle. In the second half of 2017 I made another VSCode extension, and I worked on Signal enough to push it to the store for people to try out.
Now, back to 2018. I didn't work on personal projects as much in 2018. I started the year expecting to publish a post about Signal every month, I only made two. I randomly started working on a Spotify app for Windows Phone. Only to stop working on it about two weeks after I started. Then I didn't commit at all for almost two months.
So what happened? I don't really know. My life didn't really change between the second half of 2017 and right now. I've been in Seattle the entire time, I go to work every day, and I come home around the same time every day. I don't have as much unstructured free time as I did in college but even when I first started my job I still worked on other code projects. Now, it looks like, work broke my habit of working on other things. I honestly didn't think that would happen but when I get home after coding for 6+ hours coding more at home is very very low on my priority list. That's kind of sad considering how much I loved making random shit for the last 4 years before 2018. Maybe it's just a part of growing up.
In 2019, I've told myself that I'm going to try and text my friends more, I'm going to start working on Signal again, but I also think I need to find a balance in my life where I really enjoy coding at home again. The reason I even went to school for Computer Science and Game Design was because of the small games and programs I started making almost 10 years ago. It really wouldn't sit well with me if I stopped doing that, less than two years into working full time.
Who knows what 2019 might bring, what changes might occur, and what challenges I may face, continuing to get older is not that much fun anymore, it's just a part of life now. But hopefully I can make the best of it.