The First Post (Why this Blog)

This is me exploring.

I'm a tech type.  Mostly software programming.  Up to this point all of my development projects fell into two categories:  Owned by employers, and tech demo's rarely worth sharing with others.  I've benefited so much from others sharing their work that I'm changing things up a bit.

Starting with my first project, which will be published shortly, I'm going to be using this blog to share stuff I'm working on.  There will be status updates along with posts on what I discover along the way.  Whenever possible I'll share code under the MIT license to allow others to re-use it freely.

You'll see mistakes and corrections.  That is just part of exploring and learning.  Coming from a tools and automation background, I have a very wide area of interest.  So you'll also see a wide variety of content.

While the content will vary a lot, most will have a common wrapper.  The wrapper domain will be "simulations".   Game-like, but not really.  I'm wrapping everything as a simulation because it will give me a great deal of latitude to re-use and refine code.  Here is an example:

Desire: I want to study computational geometry, C++, and voxel graphics.
Project:  Implement a navigation mesh generator in Java, derived form a C++ code base.

Desire: Continue study of computational geometry.  Add graph theory and associated algorithms.
Project:  Implement pathfinding algorithms in a simulated environment, using the output from the navigation mesh project.

Desire: Continue study of C++ and study Java/C++ adapters.
Project:  Using my knowledge of navigation meshes and pathfinding, implement a Java adapter to the C++ code on which the first project was based.

Desire: Study performance constrained networking and web development.
Project: Implement a server-side virtual environment simulator using the previous projects with the presentation layer in a web browser.

And on and on and on.  Just about any domain I can think of to explore can be done by building on a simulated environment.

At the end of the day, I can only hope that these explorations are useful to others.

Be good and don't eat the broccoli.