2014 - Final posting

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As another year ends, it’s time for a small retrospect. Next year marks the 10th anniversary of my personal blog, so I’ve been posting about my programming adventures for over a decade now (the first version of www.delphigl.de went online 2003 afair) and I’m still having lots of fun hacking code into different IDEs with different languages, though focus is shifting from time to time. And that’s actually what makes coding so much fun, it’s a constant learning progress that forces you to constantly sharpen your coding skills, learn new languages, adopt to new technologies etc.

So yes, it’s very time consuming, but it’s also very rewarding and surely has positive effects on your brain and all other mind-related skills. And I don’t think that I’ll ever stop coding, ‘cause that would surely leave a whole in my life that would be hard to fill, especially since it’s so creative.

So here we are at the end of 2014, and lot’s of things happened during that year, so I’ll post a quick summary of the programming related things that moved me during 2014.

Twitter

I’m on twitter now (like anybody else on this tiny planet I guess). The main reason I’m not posting as much on my personal blog as I used to to is twitter. I initially decided to use it because people were talking about my OpenGL and OpenGL ES hardware databases and tools, and wanted to reply to them.

But in the end it turned out to be much more and I’m using twitter now  on a daily basis now. It’s the perfect way of finding like-minded programmers, and you often get instant feedback and end up with interesting discussions. And you also realize that all those coders at google, nvidia, amd, valve, etc. are just regular people like yourself ;)

JavaScript and WebGL

2014-11-16 19_35_20-Unscheinbar (WIP) - Copyright © 2014 by Sascha Willems (www.saschawillems.de)

I also did lots of experimenting with JavaScript and WebGL. Though I must admit that it’s a complete different world compared to the strongly typed languages I normally use. I kinda like JavaScript (although it seems most “real programmers” wouldn’t agree with me on that), and compared with WebGL it’s great to see how easy it is to use OpenGL on almost every device out there by simply opening up a browser.

Though WebGL is still in it’s early stages, it’s already shaping up very well, and khronos is putting in a lot of effort to make WebGL the open 3D standard for the web. And I wish them the best luck.

And if you followed my tweets, you may have seen that I’m developing a new game with JavaScript and WebGL. It’s called “unscheinbar” and will be using the random dungeon generator I posted to JS some time ago. It’ll be more of an experiment than a game, with visuals and elements found on trugbild. There’s not much to see yet, as it’s still in it’s very early stages, but I hope to have it up and running some time within the first half of 2015.

And since JS and WebGL are so great for rapid prototyping, I also have a few more game ideas written down somewhere for which I’d like to create some prototypes in 2015.

C++ rocks (again)

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A few weeks ago Microsoft dropped the bomb that made me completely move away from Delphi/Free Pascal for my private programming stuff : They released the Visual Studio 2013 community edition.

So with a full (free) Visual Studio available to everyone, I completely stopped using and Pascal related languages for my private coding (Delphi and Free Pascal with Lazarus). The IDE is just awesome, and if you compare it to the fat, slow and buggy Delphi-IDE it just shows that MS is driving circles around Embarcadero.

So for my first (real) C++ projects in over a decade I decided to port the OpenGL hardware capability viewer (glCapsViewer) over to C++, using Qt for the Gui. And it’s awesome. I’m having so much fun writing C++ code in Visual Studio that I can hardly stop (screw the dishes ;) ).

It’s coming along very nice, and won’t become a simple but port. It’ll be getting some new features and I also plan on releasing the sources to it, so other people can contribute to it.

Going open source

For a long time, I had severe reservations on releasing my sources to the public, and with the exception of a few simple projects and headers, most of my source was closed and not available to the public. But with the switch over to new programming languages and platforms, I decided it would be a great way to put my new sources into the public, and that’s why I decided to open up a repository over at bitbucket.

And that’s what I’ll pursue even more for 2015 : Making more of my sources available to the public. Sure, there may be drawbacks like people “stealing” your code and not giving a single f**k on your license, but the advantages easily outweigh these, so I’m still sure that this is a good idea.

Closing words

And so ends another great year, with lots of great stuff happening on the programming front. If 2015 will be anything like 2014, I’d be totally happy :)

So I wish you all happy holidays a happy and healthy 2015!