Over a year has gone by ever since I started this blog. I can’t believe time flew by this fast. I think the monotone covid issues just make every single day feel the same, and thus you don’t notice time flying by. But let’s stop talking about this darn depressive stuff and talk about some interesting things and review the posts I’ve made.

Series

So I’ve written some series of blogs like the SOLID principles of OO design. I really enjoyed writing these since I encounter them daily on the job or during my hobby projects. Reviewing these items was also rather nostalgic and since I included segments in the blogs that relate the principles to other programming paradigms and software architecture, I had to do some research here and there. You can read the SOLID blogs if you search for ‘SOLID’ on my blog,

I also wrote a lot about the courses I did on Udemy. All of the courses were rather technical and I think I summarized them pretty well. I think, the course about becoming a solution architect was the only more abstract course I did. I also still have two courses in the pipeline, one about Azure and another about CSS but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to finish it. The CSS course is a 35 hour course, that is far to boring to watch/listen even at 1.5x speed or more. It is very informative but my attention simply does not span that long.

I think the most interesting and important course I did on Udemy this year was the course about asynchronous and parallel programming in C#. I’ve used so many things I picked up from that course in my everyday work. Even in the context of Unity3D I’m applying async/await calls with proper cancellation and continuation. Which is very interesting because most of Unity3D’s API is only accessible from the main thread. But with the way the SynchronizationContext is handled with async/await you are able to get away with a lot of stuff. This course really helped me in this regard.

Also the courses about performance and garbage collection were interesting to me. You can read about the courses when you search for ‘Udemy’ on my blog.

Book Reviews

I also wrote two book reviews. I wish I had the chance to write more but, what can I do. The books I did review are Don’t make me think by Steve Krug, and Object-Oriented Software Engineering by Ivar Jacobson.

The first book I picked up because I spend a lot of time doing UI work in my current job. This UI may be in Unity3D but the book is still relevant. Also, now with the new UIElements in Unity3D being kinda stable, it makes a lot of sense to get some proper UI/UX skills. No more annoying LayoutGroup hacks, but proper responsive CSS like UI.

The latter book I really wanted to read since it is highly regarded in the software craftsmanship community. Many people in the community are still talking about this book in some way or another. It always seems to come back. I read this book front-to-back and it really lived up to expectations. So if you want to read a very complete book on software development and the processes involved; read this one. I have to say some things are a bit dated since the book is 30 years old but a great deal still applies to things we do today!

Projects

I also wrote about some fun personal projects like Pointless-Man, Wizard and LastPass-Unity. Those were really fun to write, both the software as the blog. Pointless-Man started as a stupid meme project me and a colleague discussed at work. We were talking about how we disliked the Unity Editor scripting API so I challenged him to write a tic-tac-toe clone that runs in an editor window. He didn’t write it, but I couldn’t resist such a dumb project. However, I’m not going to write my 10th tic-tac-toe clone so I wrote yet another PacMan clone that is fully operational running in a Unity3D editor window.

I got triggered to write Wizard when an old colleague contacted me about some weird things that were going on in their CI/CD pipeline. The InnoSetup was leaving behind uninstall files after each new install. I think they fixed it by updating to the latest InnoSetup client. I then checked the Unity AssetStore if there were any package available to run or configure InnoSetup from within Unity3D, and there weren’t. This was pretty surprising to me, so I wrote one. I had a lot of fun writing it and it works pretty well.

I also wrote a blog about a project I did earlier last year, before I started blogging. But since it took me so much time to get it running, I thought I would give it some attention by writing a quick blog about. I’m talking about my LastPass-Unity package. I learned so much from writing this thing; a lot of stuff about Linux and MacOs keychain and security respectively, Brew not coming pre-installed on MacOS… What!? It still amazes me haha. Another fun fact is that Android does not have a native keychain like service, so I needed to write a native android package to simulate that behaviour and then expose it in Unity3D as a custom native plugin.

Random Blogs

I wrote a couple of random blogs about Agile, Technical practices of Agile/eXtreme programming, SCR*Masters and the “One Hacker Way”. All of these blogs were really fun to write since they were not reviews or related to real ‘existing’ material. They were subject to my own creativity which was nice. I hope I’ll write mote blogs like these in the coming year.

Enterprise Architecture

September 2021 I enrolled in a course about Enterprise Architecture (EA) at the Open University. At the time of writing this blog it is still ongoing and it will end coming Friday, the 12th of November. This course took a great deal of my time so, apart from the EA course, I haven’t been able to write any blogs or work on personal projects. That will change on the 13th of November since I’ll be done. The course was interesting but for me personally, there was too much literature involved. I think with a bit less literature, and maybe some more in depth questions regarding the literature would have resulted in the same amount of knowledge. But, I’m not sure… I’m in the process of writing blogs about this course. I’m doing every Learning Unit (LU) separately, so I still need to write a couple of them. I’m planning to document it all, also as reference for future students. This is probably going to take up most of my time in the near future.

What is next?

Well, as I hinted in the previous section; I’m going to finish my blog series about the EA course I’m doing. I documented 2/9 LU so I still need 7 to go. I also have some Unity3D projects that I want to write in the pipeline which are a lot of work I think. But, I’m not going to spoil that yet. Also, there is one more major thing but I’ll probably reveal that somewhere beginning of next year since I’m setting that all up now. There are also a number of interesting books I’m reading/going to read next year so I’ll probably write more reviews plus I’ll checkout some more courses n Udemy if I find the time.

So, for this second year of the blog I think we can expect, well, more of the same. I’ve been enjoying this so I’ll just keep doing what I do.

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