Jayden Journal Public Access: Spring 2024

Published: 2024-03-01

you are only obligated to listen to the first track

Another self indulgent “What I’m up to” post. Although considering you’re on my site you’re at least… a little interested in me right?

…right?

Like last time, I’ll talk about how my goals from last season went, and what I’ll be up to this season.

What I’ve been up to (Dec 2023 - Feb 2024)

School / Work

I’m just about halfway through my term as a Software Engineer on the Event Data Stream team at Scotiabank. Ironically I find myself doing less development This term then last. I’ve been using Typescript and Playwright to do UI testing on a Next.js app. The work is pretty simple and not very challenging, but I do feel more tightly integrated to a dev team though. I’m getting my PRs approved and making tickets and participating in standups and stuff. it’s cool.

My manager is currently on vacation so the director has been acting as my manager. She’s very nice and is very passionate about the department and work.

My time is being split between dev work and …learning course creation? Honestly I don’t really like doing it, and I don’t feel qualified to do it. I need to learn about a team before I know what I should be putting in. I’m getting it done though.

Unfortunately I’m coding on windows this term. It’s just been in node though so it’s been fine, powershell kinda sucks though. I tried to port over my VM based solution from my previous team but it didn’t work perfectly.

In terms of my summer placement, I got some… Hot 😳 interviews lined up.

I’ll share once the offer is secured though.

I said I’d be consistient with leetcodes but stopped doing them after I passed all the technical interviews I needed to. I should get back into it though, shouldn’t get too rusty.

Outside of work, I got accepted into the York Exchange program and have been nominated to study for a semester at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo!!!! I’ve always wanted to visit japan, so I’m happy I’ll have an oppertunity to live there if everything works out. I’m just taking Gen-Ed credits there, going purley for vibes.

GDYU

The GDYU community continues to go strong. We had gotten briefly evicted from the club room, but overall I’m happy with what we got done.

Our goal was consistency and I we got that. We write things out BEFORE doing them, and have bi-weekly exec meetings. We also have some new execs to help run the club, like a dedicated social media manager.

we also tabled during Frost fest, not nearly as much foot traffic at the 2nd student center compared to in front of Vari hall, but we still gave away a tote bag and showed off the sweaters we still haven’t started selling!

We need to finish the website updates to launch our merch as well as the zine articles (our art exec got the design for the webpages done yesterday as of writing this, so I’ll get started a soon as I finish writing this).

York’s recent strike announcement might put a hamper on some of our plans but we ball regardless.

Personal Programming

Personal programming was more about changing my setup and tools used then trying to make things nessicarily. I’m a Doom Emacs and i3 user now incase you didn’t know (single file line please ladies 🤓), and that’s come with a learning curve. It’s all been super fun and interesting though, and none of it is nessicarily, VScode works perfectly fine for most people.

Also working on a bot for the GDYU discord server which will have features to help encourage more game development happening in GDYU.

I also have a lot of personal site updates I’d like to get through, My mailing list is currently broken!!!

Godot

Nothing

I have made no godot projects.

We had a yudum dare, I started somthing.

But my heart wasn’t in it.

I am sorry.

I have been playing Void Stranger

It’s reminded me of why I want to make games.

Things will change this season.

Drawing

Drawabox

Defeated Lesson 5, only took one year.

I started the 250 cylinder challenge, about 80 cylinders in. Although I’m taking a break from it until the first page of Mercury Man (the comic I’m working on) is drawn.

Non-Drawabox

Mercury Man is the name of the comic I’ve been working on. It’s based on expanded lore from characters me and my friends made up though school assignments throughout the years. Creative writing is fun, as if I didn’t have enough hobbies as is. But I wanted to start working on a specific art related project instead of just picking and making whatever comes into my head. Making a comic would force me to draw lots of different things in different ways, as well as help work on my composition skills for panels. The big issue I’m running into right now is drawing things consistently and drawing things quickly. Consistency will come with time, as I figure out how I want things to look, and drawing things quickly ironically comes from thinking before drawing and being intentional with my mark-making, so I don’t take 5 tries to draw a line.

I had wanted to make 8 pages, and I technically made 6. 5 of them were for the Drawabox prompathon and were made in a day, the other one is the Mercury Man page and it’s taken over a week. The power of time limits.

Japanese

I was going to write this section in japanese, which would’ve been cool, but I do want this to come out soon, and writing in japanese right now would’ve taken a while. Started learning japanese in january. Right now I’m learning Vocab + Kanji with Wanikani and grammar through the Genki textbooks.

Language learning is very interesting, and unlike other “hobbies” people pick up. I’ll likely expand upon my install observations in a separate post so I won’t say much here. I’m happy with my progress but am looking to start doing more using the language instead of learning the language.

Health

Physical

I can’t do an L-sit.

I did hit 10 pull ups though, I do a lot of pull ups, made a weighted belt to do them with too. Might get into climbing to do something with all this upper body strength.

I stretch consistently and try to go to sleep and wake at the same time every day. Sleeping is very important y’know!

Mental

I’ve been meditating on what I’ve been calling the “improvement paradox”, and the idea that comparisons and accomplishments will constantly be moving higher as you improve at something, and the way to achieve an inner sense of confidence and accomplishment comes not only from what you’re able to and and how you feel about it.

This will probably also be another post, I’ll save it for then.

I’ve also been reading through Meditations. It’s interesting how the inner conflicts and issues of people have gone pretty much unchanged for almost two thousand years. Our problems usually aren’t as unique as we think.

Marcus Aurelius is now my imaginary friend.

Blog

Got 2 posts out, would’ve wanted to get 3 but it’s alright, I do really like writing these though, especially considering nobody reads them (yet!).

What I will be up to: Spring 2024

The Theme: Get things done!!!

I’d like to get better at setting deadlines and being selective with the kinds of project within each hobby I spend time on.

I’ve gotten really good at spending time working on something every day, and being very process not product focused. Which is important for being able to get work done, but my issue is that I wasn’t really selective with the work I was doing. I’d bounce between different projects and not commit to anything, which causes me to end up with nothing to show after all the time I’ve spent “working” on things.

I want to focus on more “project’s I’m interested in making” and less “projects to do as practice”. I have too much cool stuff I want to get done and I always think of them as things I’ll eventually get to. I want to make a plan, set deadlines, and stick to them, and actually have something to show.

work/school

First and Foremost issue is to finalize my Summer internship. That’ll hopefully happen soon. I’ll finish off my winter term strong as well!!!

Also work through whatever setup I’ll need to work through for the exchange semester.

GDYU

GDYU has a very strong community of people interested in games, but we’ve ended up neglecting to make games because of it.

Yudum Dare 5 had 1 entry. Not good.

It’s not only my own game dev neglect but from some of our execs as well. Also from a lack of teaching game development and encouraging people to participate in our jams.

So this season I want to focus on Gamedev happening in the game dev club. This will not only come from me, but also from more workshops and really pushing our jam as our major event. We’re also trying out multi part workshops.

The tech department (me) is also working on a new discord bot feature that will hopefully encourage more game dev.

Health

Mental

I want to spend time writing about my feelings more!

I think I let my thoughts ruminate in my head before I sleep and it makes it hard to actuality fall asleep. Head not empty and it’s a problem.

I also have some methods I’ve been practicing to sleep better like 4-7-8 breathing and the military sleep method. Hopefully they work out.

I also want to try and get out the house more often. The library seems to have programmer meet ups I could attend-help out with. Also GDYU stuff.

Physical

Perhaps I’ll start Gymming for real this time. RN I just do calisthenics in my room after work, but I’m fortunate enough to have a 90s home gym in the basement I could go and use instead, but my room is more frictionless.

I do struggle to set fitness goals, so I’ll try to be consistent and see if anything specific appears to me later.

Hobbies

JP

I’d like to finish Genki 1, and continue to do Wanikani every day.

I’d like to start using the language as soon as possible, so trying to play a game or read a manga is something I’d like to do this season, as well as actually use the lanugage with other people.

I’ve Heard Dragon Quest 5 and Yostuba are good choices for first piece of japanese media respectively. My issue with retro games is that games with low resolution font are harder to read and tend to not use Kanji, which I ironically find makes it harder to read.

Wanikani has a forum I could try hanging out in, and York has a japanese student club that holds language exchanges. I have options for that as well.

Dev

Not-Gamedev

I need to finish ALL my non-game dev related programming projects before I start making games. Mostly because these projects are things that other people are going to benefit from, so I’d like to get them up and running before I work on stuff for myself.

These include:

• the gdyu website
• the gdyu bot updates
• that’s all actually

Additionally I’d like to fix the mailing list on my site, and improve SEO? Add a sitemap/rss feed as well. It’d be nice if people read these and I wasn’t just screaming into the void y’know? But that’s not a priority.

I’ll also need to figure out how doom emacs works, and build out workflows that work for what I do. With great power comes a lot of setting up. 🤓

Gamedev

Game dev is GOING TO HAPPEN this season. It’s hard to set specific goals because it hinges on how much time the non-game dev work takes, but I’d hope to be all set up before end of march? Expect… two things. Of… sizes.

Really hold me to this one!!!

Need to first set up doom emacs and the godot major mode to do everything I need it to.

Drawing

Drawabox

I can certainly finish the 250 Cylinder challenge.

Lesson 6 is very different from lessons 1-5 so It’s hard to set a goal for it, I might update this post later on once I have a better idea.

non-Drawabox

I need to make some Mercury Man. How could I fail my

talented,

inspiring,

often imitated,

NEVER duplicated,

accountability partner Lee Nordqst herself. (look out for her comic it’ll be much better then my stuff)

I’ll adjust my style as I go, and try to be intentional with my mark-making. To go fast is to go well, and to go well is to go slow, ironically.

Right now I’d like to get a comfortable workflow set up. Work through the steps it would take from ideas in my obsidian vault to a finished page I could publish. Thinking about how to publish it is another thing to do. Use webtoon? make my own site for it? I’d weigh out the options and see what’s best for me.

Can’t give a page count because I’m still not sure how long a page takes. But maybe that in itself can be a goal this season.

Blog

I will blog more often, writing is fun.

Minimum one post a month.

That’s all

If you read this you should let me know, it’d certainly make me feel like I’m not that guy in the talking to a brick wall gif. Although I’ll try to make some future blog post a bit more generally useful and less about myself.

But it is nice to get all my thoughts in writing!

Tell me about what you want to get up to or something I don’t know???

Bye.