@Lino_JR @emitche @TinaSohl @DavidGoldfield

Be sure to read the instructions to install beta and/or daily alongside your currently installed Thunderbird!

Beta: thunderbird.net/en-US/download…

Daily: developer.thunderbird.net/thun…

Beta TopicBox: thunderbird.topicbox.com/group…

Daily TopicBox: thunderbird.topicbox.com/group…

Thunderbird Beta

^Thunderbird

what is your opinion on cheese?

Depends. A lot of cheeses are a sensory problem for me (mostly taste-wise, it often has a weird sour taste, but sometimes texture-wise too), but there are exceptions - e.g. melted in a pizza or a cheeseburger it's actually really nice. But yeah, it's complicated

@cinnamon@mk.absturztau.be:

How did you learnt to code? What motivated you?

Ok, so it's gonna be really long and weird.

So I started from Ruby, my father suggested me either a website or a book - I honestly don't remember. It was probably in russian, and I'm not sure it's even online anymore. I was in like 5th grade, so probably around 12yo. ± a few years, I don't remember exactly

Then at some point (also in middle school) I got into WarCraft 3 mapping. It had a scripting language called JASS, with a few community extensions like vJASS which hacked together stuff like basic OOP. I don't want to know how terrible it was inside, but it was my first contact with OOP and that was what made it click for me ^^

It's worth mentioning that we did not have CS classes at all in school. I eventually changed schools (not only for that reason, also e.g. bullies etc), but the new one actually had very decent classes. And well, when it started programming, I had enough experience that it was a complete non-issue. Instead, I was browsing through the available API (it was pascal and I don't remember what library) and found that you can move terminal caret and apply colors. Then everything clicked and I tried to make a game out of that :3

I did. It was a simple bomberman clone, and in fact I still have it. I will show screenshots of this and other projects on fedi ^^

But it was janky. Terminals are slow, and it was VTE in (it was 9th grade, so 2012) and it was not fast. While I eventually found ways to optimize "graphics" output so it doesn't flicker, that was later. So I learned SDL and converted that game to actual graphics ^^ (well, "graphics" - I can't draw at all, so it was the symbols I used but converted to images)

Using that knowledge I tried to do a few more things. At the time I had a hyperfixation on Minecraft, as one does, so I tried to make a procedural terrain generator. It was fairly janky, but it worked.

Then later I got into modding Minecraft, and needed to learn Java and a bit of LWJGL for that. Ofc I also used that to make games :3 Well, I had to learn to use LWJGL properly for that, in Minecraft I didn't need to touch it all that much. And I also needed to learn OpenGL, tho uhh, it was GL 1.x, with fixed pipeline/immediate drawing. Which - tbh, it was probably for the best, I still think it's much easier to learn than modern GL - that can be overwhelming with the amount of setup you need to do.

So I did a bunch of small projects to learn things - usually I was picking a simple game concept/genre and trying to reimplement it. I learned a lot in process, and it was very very fun ^^

I also got my first Android phone at around this time, so tried to make apps for it. I disliked all available music players, so I wrote my own - tho I didn't finish or publish it, and it doesn't build anymore. The current Android version at the time was 4.4, and I was unable to get Android Studio to build it :( So I don't have any screenshots or anything, even tho I do still have the code.

Also my school tried to get me into competitive coding multiple times, but I never liked that nor was particularly good at it.

Since I was also using Linux I was occasionally modifying stuff I used to fix personal itches. For example, I made a Unity (the Ubuntu thing) mod that was moving the menu button back onto the top panel because I really disliked the new design (still dislike it, really, it breaks the whole model IMO).

(I am fairly vocal that I don't want to spend time tweaking my system nowadays, that's because I already did lots of that while I was a teen and got sick of it :3)

Then I joined uni and didn't really have time for programming anymore. I abandoned all of my Minecraft mods (to be fair, they were also deep in feature creep territory, rebasing them for new versions was hell and I was really getting tired of that, so that was my lesson about avoiding feature creep...) and game development. Well, I still did a few games as uni projects because ofc I did :3

In uni I learned C, but it was pretty crushing in general and eventually I couldn't continue and abruptly left it in 2017.

During the break I really needed to recover, and I discovered gnome-games a bit earlier, so I was using it extensively, and naturally got into developing it as well, fixing personal itches. I also got into general GNOME stuff, starting from Epiphany iirc. Then it kinda escalated and here I am :3

Then I started my second time in uni, and it was a lot more fun than the first time. I actually used uni a lot to learn GObject. I remember I did one assignment as an introspected C library + GUI in either Vala, Python or JS (I don't remember which, I was using all three for different assignments :3) just for fun.

I still liked doing flashy game dev stuff, but didn't get to do it a lot anymore. There were exceptions, like I made a basic Zelda dungeon clone with a map editor for an OOP assignment, because I mean OOP was second nature to me at this point and I just wanted to do something fun ^^

Writing report for that thing wasn't as fun tho - the idea was that you have like maybe 10 classes and I had over an hundred ​​
Despite the fun stuff I eventually burned out and left again at the beginning of 2020 (uni really isn't compatible with how my brain works :/). By that time I was heavily involved in GNOME, and well, I'm still here ^^

So yeah, my background was mostly game development. ^^ And now I'm doing UIs, so fairly far off but also I really really love visual stuff and making good-looking things, so I guess in that sense it's a continuation of that.

Lemme know (on fedi) if you want me to show screenshots of some of the mentioned projects :3

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#ProjectTapestry #Fediverse #iOSDev

I'm with @slightlyoff on this: toot.cafe/@slightlyoff/1118347…

I think Sinofsky's response under "It is my computer, and I should be able to install any software I want" is especially dismissive. I refuse to accept that the good days of true innovation by individuals and small teams developing types of software not explicitly blessed by the platform developer are over. It's true that my current phone is an iPhone, but I'll probably go back to Android.

Alex Russell

2024-01-28 17:15:17

If you hadn't already written off Steve Sinofsky as a monopoly apologist and blowhard, this oughta seal the deal:

hardcoresoftware.learningbyshi…

It's a masterclass in deflection and denial, in love with the idea that being maximally dickish (as Apple has been) is always the best policy. Wild, wild stuff.

Building Under Regulation [215.]

An essay on the EU Digital Markets Act and Apple’s Update on apps distributed in the European Union (and some personal history)

^{Steven Sinofsky (Hardcore Software by Steven Sinofsky)}