March 24, 2018: Getting Started
Developer log for Saturday, March 24, 2018
This was my first week of self employment after leaving Oracle, and the big focus was site generation. I had originally planned to leave Oracle at the end of March (and possibly even work part-time in April), but the max lead time I was able to give notice for was 2 weeks, so everything ended up being a bit more rushed.
Things should start to feel less rushed as I get my feet under me. I'm looking forward to spending more time building visible things, rather than just working behind the scenes on internal tooling.
Funding will also be a major effort soon — I don't expect to live purely off of donations, but I still need to do some research into Patreon, Flattr, Gratipay, and other sites.
What I did this week:
- Site Generation: The current site looks pretty bad, but the tooling is a lot better than you might expect. There’s a lot of potential here me to do cool things with integration testing, draft pages, auto-generating RSS feeds, etc… so look forward to some redisigns over the next several weeks.
- Raise: Within the next week or so, I’ll be abstracting out my generator tools into an Open Source library called Raise. This will speed up site generation dramatically for me, and may end up being useful for a lot of other people.
- Coordinated with AsciiDoctor: Part of my effort for site generation was getting AsciiDoctor to work well with templates. That led to this exchange on Twitter, which led to me speeding up my timeline to coordinate with members of the AsciiDoctor.js dev team. I’m pretty excited about the direction this API is going, and I’ll likely continue to work with this team as Raise matures.
- Livestreaming: I set up lighting, a webcam, and a microphone and did a livestream of Celeste on Friday night. I want to make this a regular thing, it’s good for me to get back into the habit of playing games. I’ll also likely be doing regular dev streams. If you want a preview of what that will likely look like, take a look at past attempts.