Happy New Year fellow coders! January is often a time to reflect about the past year and think about the future.
In May of 2012 I started artsycoder.com, a place to share my coding adventures with others. I had a few different projects on the go at the time, and made a goal to publish at least one article each month. Some months the articles practically wrote themselves and others I hit that Publish button with a sigh of relief. By December, my goal had been met! If I were to sum up the year in learning, it was still quite client-side Web-focused, with a series on responsive design, some HTML5, CSS and jQuery, but with the introduction of PHP, AJAX and ASP.NET/C#, I was starting to get into newer areas of server-side coding and application development.
Towards the end of last year, I started to think about my projects for 2013. Java mobile apps, PHP database programming, CSS3 animation and HTML5 games came to mind. During the month of January I have been taking a peek into all of these areas to figure out where to focus first.
I completed a series of tutorials on teamtreehouse.com on how to build a simple Java app for Android, and I got it to work on an actual phone and tablet which was very exciting. Then I dreamt up a great idea for a simple game and started to look into how to go about building that. Well as you may know, game theory is a whole other ball game (pardon the pun) than building a simple Java app. I thought, well, I have the idea, perhaps this is the time to switch over to HTML5 and build it in that? On to a different Web tutorial. In HTML5, as in Java, it became apparent that if I was serious about this gaming business, I would have to get game theory sorted first. Was I ready for this?
…Or should I go with the original idea I had a while back about building an Android grocery list app? teamtreehouse.com has another series on building a similar Java app that would be a great help with this. However it they are still in the progress of building the remaining tutorials…
…Perhaps I should just pop on over and try out my CSS3 animation idea in the meantime? However, it also looks a little complex…
…I dipped into the PHP book again – am I ready to tackle setting up a database, exploring security concerns, etc.?
Time to breathe…
Obviously, I would love to take on all these areas. However, as I discovered, they are all big undertakings. I had some advice recently to take one area, and learn a lot about it (in simplistic terms). This is probably the time to take that advice to heart.
When it comes down to it, these projects are interesting to me for different reasons, but are also surprisingly linked together. First, I honestly want to have fun building something that I can see. I love piecing together code to result in a creation that works beautifully, like an art project. That’s why games are so appealing, they have so many little creative aspects to them that you can actually see in the end. Animation obviously would be on the fun side as well. On the other hand, I really want to stretch my programming muscle with a more complex language like Java or .NET/C#, to ideally build standalone applications for mobile devices or with a server-side Web scripting language like PHP to further take my Web skills beyond the client-side.
Life is busy though, and I need to focus on one of these items for a little while in order to really achieve something. I think for now I will stick with Java mobile apps – working the coding muscle to see a cool result. Java is a language I learned the basics of in university, and I have been enjoying the tutorials so far. I’ll keep on with the new series I started, and see where it takes me. Perhaps I will investigate more game theory as well. This means I have a lot to learn, but maybe not as much time or content for monthly articles for now. Sometimes you have to set off on the long journey though to find the best rewards.
So off I go with some new goals in mind. I may not stop in as often as before for the next while but I shall return! Best of luck with your coding goals for the new year!