Jayden Journal Public Access: Summer 2025

Published: 2025-05-09

Hello, Everynyan!

How are you?

I’m unemployed, thank you.

I like breaking the year into 3 distinct seasons based on the academic calendar, it’s nice!, I get three new years a year.

How did last season go (Jan - April 2025)

This set of 4 months was better than the previous!

GDYU Attended the Level Up Student Showcase with our project: Citizen Jane.

It turned out… Okay. It was our first time doing large scale group development and learned a lot if we ever feel like trying something like that again. I’d compare it to that episode of Nathan for You where he tries to get 40 maids to clean a house in 6 minutes, because One Maid can clean your house in four hours and two can clean it in two hours. After a while you get logarithmic returns on amount of work you get out of the people you have because you don’t have the management overhead required to organize them. Level Up itself was fun, It was cool seeing all the other student projects around, a lot of people came out from York to see our project, so thank you!

I also got my G license!!! Freed from the MTO Tsukiyomi. Shout outs to Harry the driving instructor, if you need a driving guy and are in the Brampton area, lmk.

I was also consistent with Daily Game development for all of March and April. Mostly for work on the Term Project. It’s a fun habit to maintain and proves how much you can get done by doing a little bit often.

I also reunited with an old friend I thought I’d never hear from again. It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Life is long, n stuff.

My Classes went fine except for the one I failed. I was fairly busy with term project related stuff and didn’t give it the time it deserved, retaking it this summer.

Goals for this season (May - August 2025)

I do have one final job prospect that might hire me but I’m not going to hold my breath. If I do end up getting a job I guess I’ll have to adjust these plans. I do blame the lack of job success on Leetcode, more specifically a lack of doing Leetcodes.

I hate Leetcodes! I hate them both conceptually (what they represent) and practically (the act of solving them), the full rant I’ll save for another time. However I hate being unemployed even more, and there have been many a time I’ve gotten to a technical interview round and failed whatever question they asked me. Leetcodes are the largest controllable factor me being hired for internship, and there’s no way around them. I have to get back into it, so I am.

I’m going to try streaming my study/work sessions and potentially making some YouTube videos too. I think I have a cool desk setup! But also I think being more public about my habits and lifestyle will help me be more accountable for maintaining them, as well as potentially inspire others to try to embrace hard work, deep learning, and discomfort. Also some things might be easier to communicate in video compared to text. I don’t expect to become very popular but building a small, committed community of people interested in what I’m interested in has always been my goal. Join my mailing list

Also I now take notes/manage tasks/do my thinking in Obsidian. I was a big emacs + org mode user for the last two years, and I still recommend it. The two things that brought me over to obsidian was first class mobile support and scripting with JavaScript instead of emacs lisp. Emacs is complicated software and the interoperability with literate programming workflows through org is super valuable, but I generally find myself using neovim over emacs for text editing these days, so using emacs exclusively for org mode might not be worth the extra work.

Normally using proprietary freeware to organize my data would be a non-starter for me, but Obsidian doesn’t take any of my data away from me and keep it in some proprietary syntax with a ton of metadata, It’s all still plain markdown files. It’s more of a pretty renderer then a opinionated system. If the two person team behind obsidian suddenly turn evil then I can simply take my vault and all my data is just as I left it.

I have too many projects in mind, the things I’ve always pushed off until I had free time. Now that I find myself with that free time (with the exception of one course I am retaking) I’m being met with decision paralysis when it comes to how to spend the time I have. One thing I know for sure is whatever programming I do is almost certainly going to involve Rust. It’s quickly become an obsession of mine. Lifetimes! Borrow Checker! Mutex! Cow! Bevy is an game engine that uses Rust that I’ve been having a lot of fun using as well. Expect a blog post about both!

Rust is a systems language (although it’s designed to be ergonomic enough to be used where people would usually reach for higher level languages too) so I think wanting to get “lower level” and focus on sharpening programming fundamentals would fit it’s use. I might try taking some of the information I got in a computer organization class and build an emulator, I’ve heard Chip-8 is the easiest system to emulate, but the Gameboy would likely be the simplest system that I’m personally interested in. I’d also like to tackle some of the fundamentals of Game Dev and computer graphics, Maybe build a Raycast renderer and build my way up to a DOOM BSP renderer?

I also have a game review thingy in the works, inspired by Action Button. It’s a game I’ve wanted to sit down and analyze on my own, but I think I’ve found a very fun angle I can use to make the review a bit more interesting than me just giving my thoughts. Expect at least the first part of that that this season too.

I had made getting back into Japanese a goal but it’s a LOT of work and a big lifestyle change to integrate effective. I’m already making a lot of other changes so I’m going to hold off on it and see how the season goes, I would love to get back into it though.

That’s about it!