Trying this out as my first blog post.

I have a habit of starting these types of things and totally failing to follow through on them long term. We will see if this becomes yet another one of these started projects that gets abandoned and lives its lonely life without update.

Why am I doing this?

The main reason I am starting this blog is to document/record my journey learning programming and web development. I am currently a controls engineer in nuclear power but during college took several CS courses and haved always had the itch to really learn programming. The rapid prototyping and problem solving just really scratches an itch in my brain.

Current Goals

I have already thought of a few project ideas in a tiered approach to help me learn development and have fun while I do.

1. Create a blog (this blog!).

   Goal being to both use some simple HTML/CSS along with a basic framework to facilitate blogging. Ill make a future post on the details of this.

2. Create a couple simple Pico-8 games and host them on this webpage.

   Start with a basic recreation or two of classic arcade games and then an original idea. Reason for starting with Pico-8 is just to force me to keep scope small and classic NES type games are just fun.

3. Create a simple workout timer web app. IE. for laying out workouts with repetitions etc and timer notifications etc to help you during a workout. This begins to push a more full application while also keeping scope small.

4. Either jump to a Gadot game (2D) or develop a chess opening practice app in javascript/react. Goal with this is just to pick a bigger project that will really push my skills but that ideally isn’t too large. I want it to be something I strive to play/use for myself to keep motivation.

Ground rules

Really there are no hard rules, this is for fun as a learning experience. However I do have a few I want to set now.

1. No AI Code. Im allowed to use it to help me understand things or suggest paths to go down but I do not want to simply “vibe code” these things. How fast I output this stuff doesnt matter. I would rather fully understand what I am doing as best as I can.
2. Have fun, the moment it really feels like work this isn’t worth doing. This isn’t a career, its a hobby on the side. Maybe one day it can provide some income in retirement or something.

Conclusion

Lets see how this goes. The website is definitely going to be a work in progress for a while (it is the first project after all).