Happy New Year! - And Recent Projects

Well, it’s been longer than I had intended since I last updated this blog. I’ve been keeping myself busy though – busier than I have been for the past year or so. I don’t have a lot to show for the past few months, but I do want to talk about what I’ve been working on a little bit.

A full day of learning Flutter

I went to a Hackathon in early December, and while I didn’t have a good idea for a project going in, I ended up creating a mobile application using Flutter. While I ran into many frustrating issues starting off, I really ended up liking Flutter (and Dart) and have continued work on the application since then.

The app itself is a pretty basic activity tracker. I made it with myself in mind – without reminders, I sometimes find myself holed up in my apartment for days at a time, working on various things but not taking the time to go out and do other things with my life. The app tracks daily activities and gives reminders if it realizes I haven’t loged anything for a while.

As stated above, I enjoyed Flutter. It took a bit to catch on, but it was much simpler than trying to develop an Android application using Java had been.

Wheel of Fish

This one’s pretty silly. I run a weekly Dungeons and Dragons game, and one of the players likes to go fishing whenever possible. I was having trouble figuring out what fish to give him and how to determine if he catches them, and I was thinking about rolling from a “fish” table. This made me think of the Wheel of Fish scene from the movie UHF. On a whim, I checked if the domain wheelof.fish was available. It was. I bought it.

Right now, the page is basically just Javascript and an HTML5 canvas. You click the button, the wheel spins, it tells you what fish you get. I intend to continue development to make it a bit more fun.

For anyone interested, the way I use this in my D&D game is to have the player make a survival check to confirm that they’re able to find a good spot to fish, and an athletics check to reel in whatever the fish is. The athletics check needs to be higher is they found a really good spot, as they’ll be reeling in a very big fish. They spin the wheel to see what type of fish it is.

Current work

My job search is still going on, so I’m spending lots of time doing practice problems on LeetCode and making sure I’m prepared for interviews, but I have a few things going on besides that. I’ve paused development on the Keyboard and Mouse Sharing program, due to some hardware issues that kept me from properly testing it, but I’m working on the mobile app mentioned above, the Wheel of Fish site, a separate fitness/nutrition tracking app that I just conceptualized this week, and I’m going to try to give myself small projects that I can spend 1 or 2 days on, just making sure I constantly produce things.

I’ll try to update this more regularly too, as it definitely helps me stay on track with my goals!