What am I doing here.

In many ways I feel like I missed the boat on the whole collaboration hacking community thing. It was always something that I saw from afar and wished to be a part of but never felt useful or skilled enough to contribute. I have many friends who are always willing to jump in and code some customization or parody or whathaveyou. This sort of person is super into Richard Stallman and has a custom email address and implemented that one xkcd post about serving webpages upside down to uninvited wifi connections.

Some History

Sometime around college I started thinking of myself as a Programmer¹ and turned inward for my projects. I wanted to make games and we all know that game ideas are precious rare commodities that must be guarded at all costs. There was that one article once about the evil company who stole someone’s game idea remember that? Yeah, man, super scary shit.

Games have always been “something I might sell someday” and so they have always stayed tucked away on a private repo server.

And yet part of me always wanted to stand with the linux-t-shirt-wearing sysadmin types. I maintain an apache server running Django, I know enough python, ruby, html/css/js, etc to squeak by the basics, I am used to working in vim over an ssh connection. And all of this I picked up because it’s cool and fun. I think stuffing your hat with as many feathers as possible is a pro strat for growing as an sdev. But all of that is just for fun, right? None of that translates to anything actually useful, I thought.

The GitHub Effect

My first project on GitHub was todo-helper which I look to do a more descriptive write-up on at some point. It was a fun collab with a friend and got me used to actually using git instead of just reading about it. From then on I became more and more open to the idea of making use of this account whenever possible. So when I showed someone the work I was doing on a pure-C game engine emulating DOS-era graphics and they told me to push it to GitHub I said sure, why not.

It was a strange thing, suddenly having a personal project publicly available. I mean, I think the lifetime unique visitors of the repo at this point is barely reaching double digits so “public” is used loosely. But the idea that all my work is clickable and referenceable has some weird effects on how I approach the project.

Suddenly commit messages seem to matter and pushing working builds feels important. I was now producing content for a (made-up, fictitious) audience of peers and that was an exciting feeling. Like hey, maybe I can hangout with the GNU nerds after all.

So Here We Are

I’ve always entertained the idea of keeping a blog to write down some of my random thoughts about things but there’s always that inkling feeling of ‘who gives a shit.’ Nonetheless, there’s a lot of commentary and explanation that goes beyond what I can add to sEGA’s readme so we’ll see where this space goes.