hamilton.likes.to.draw...

For the last few months, I've been practicing my Japanese diligently. I have a goal to be able to travel to Japan and be able to communicate. I've always wanted to. I am now at the place where I can more or less recognize all of the Hiragana. This is a big thing for any learner of a new alphabet. I can read Japanese. I can't understand 90% of it, but I can read it. And that is so cool.

I am now learning the katakana, and God help me, I will soon have to learn the kanji. But that day still seems far off. I've begun trying to read conversationally, and it is... very difficult. Manga is way too far off for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trying. I bought some of the manga I loved like Naruto, One Piece and Dragonball, but even trying to get three pages into any of these is an absolute struggle. Mainly because as soon as you learn the hiragana you feel incredibly accomplished, but as soon as you get into the real world of Japanese, katakana and kanji are EVERYWHERE. Katakana feels like at least 50% of what you'll read.

And this has been mildly disheartening, but also has bolstered my resolve to learn even harder.

I sat down to make myself a reference sheet for the kana, and I am now sharing it with you, dear reader. https://hdraws.com/kana. This is a work in progress, and currently it's mostly useless on mobile. But it is, at the writing of this blog post, only 2 days of work in javascript, react, and css. I did some big work in css grids. I'm learning a lot about keyboard layouts as well.

Anyways. Thats been the last few days for me.

A couple of months ago, I was let go from my position at Krafton. It has been difficult the last few years to write about anything I was doing, since most of it was merely in the pursuit of my work. That work is often specific, and often for future products which cannot in fact be discussed.

For the past couple weeks I have been working hard on one of my own project, FilmsWith. This project is... perhaps the thing I am most proud of creating so far. It involves a subject I care deeply about; movies, film, and television. It is created using modern technology, mainly React, which means I can point to it in the modern day and not be terrified that it's code will be somehow revealed.

But it was started in a time of early React. Things have changed significantly since then, and I have only barely been able to keep up with things as they changed amidst the immense scope of my growing website. Truly, I cower in fear of the prospect of having to significantly update the code of this, my main website. It is a mammoth of a site cobbled together over 2 decades of personal and web developmental change.

I recently began a rather large code refactor of my filmswith site. I have been, in fact, quite diligent about it. I am now reaching out to others in an effort to improve it's UX. I have never really 'pushed' the website, because it has never really felt done. Many things were only half created, or half thought out out, or outright not present. But now, after my concerted efforts, I am close to something I can feel is ready for consumption by more than just myself.

The FilmsWith website was created for me. Created 'by me' is irrelevant to the more relevant 'for me'. I use it. Constantly. I find in my life that I reference movies and tv shows. And in the day and age of phones in pockets, having a quickly accessible resource for those topics is something I can't believe I was able to create.

The title of this particular post states that I am in a rut. But I am not in a creative rut. I am in a personal one. I find myself with so many avenues available to me, and so many paths to take, and none of them leading anywhere significant. Over the last few years I have worked and slept and ate, and like many before me, I find this to be unsatisfying, and worse, I find myself in a position of loneliness. Many of my friends have moved on and up, and I am meandering forward.

I wonder to what extent FilmsWith could help propel me upward. I wonder to what extent I would need to pull it down from the bottom and cobble it back together to remodernize its modernity. It was made with create-react-app. A tool which, at the time, was the appropriate tool to use. But now, not only has that tool fallen out of favor, it has in all aspects been abandoned. I will need to restart to stay afloat. It is the one aspect of the web which I hate the most. The fact that an old boat cannot simply be put in the water forever. It must periodically be brought ashore to have a significant amount of its parts be Theseus'ed.

I suppose that isn't true if the thing were to be abandoned or never improved. I have never been one to sit around and not improve. But as I get older and more cobbled together, I find it harder and harder to make my own repairs.

It has been over a year since my last post. So much has happened and changed since then. Maybe I'll find more time to write in this blog soon. Probably not... but maybe.

What if it was extraordinary times? What about then? What if life went absolutely nuts all around you, and you just sort of forgot to update it? What then?

It's been a hot minute since I've put very much on this website. I need to redesign it. I need to rewrite some things (especially an image uploader), and I need to make more of an effort to keep my self honest about my projects by posting about them in public. Let's see... where was I?

This year has been a series of big changes. At the beginning of 2021 I was let go from my full time status at the Academy of Art and I got a job as a Senior Frontend Engineer at a company called IMVU. This job has been really fantastic. But it's the first fully remote job I've ever had. Working fully remote is not something I ever sought, and it's been both freeing and frustrating in a lot of ways. I like to be around people, and if I'm totally honest, when I'm stuck in a house, I find it hard to motivate myself.

I am still teaching at the Academy sometimes. I like it. Not sure how much longer I'll be able to continue, but I think for now if they keep inviting me back, I'll continue teaching a class.

I worked on a number of personal projects. I've been doing a lot of things with themoviedb api. Did a little project with a friend for figuring out which of your friends you're most compatible with, based on the movies you like. And I just pushed a big update to filmswith, a website for browsing movie data, and comparing people and movies together. I rebuilt that app from the bottom up in React, and I've learned so much during the process.

I'm not sure I'd call 2021 a success. When 2020 started, I thought it was going to be such a good year. I had so many plans. In some ways it was great for me. But 2021 just feels like a blur. I'm not sure what to expect in 2022. I just have no idea. But I think I'm going to try to work on more personal projects. Here's hoping I can stick to that. Someone keep me honest.

So I've been learning react recently. I've been getting pretty far into it. I'm pretty confident at this point that I understand the concepts, and I'm able to execute on React Hooks effectively.

I made a quick little demo example TicTacToe game, because one of my colleagues was doing a tutorial, and I wondered if I could write one from scratch. And the answer is, I COULD, but also I pulled a tiny bit of code from one of my old examples. But honestly I just pulled the win arrays, because my brain shut down, and I couldn't think of how to do them for a second.

So if you're interested, here's a quick React app of TicTacToe, and the Github repo to go along with it.

I'm enjoying React a lot these days, and I've started multiple projects in it. It's groovy, and I like the build processes.