What I’ve Been Up To
It’s been a while since I last touched one of these blog posts.
Once I graduated college, I felt pretty exhausted. During the school years, I was grinding night and day to complete classwork and polish up my games, all while working part-time. On those weekends, I was making 7-15 hour trips down to New Jersey to take part in a percussion ensemble. And during the summers, I was marching in drum and bugle corps as a hobby (a pretty expensive one at that…). During that time, my grandfather has passed away and my family was forced to sell the house and move. For four years straight, I felt like I didn’t have a break. Now, no one really forced me to do any of the extracurricular activities. But those were my passions, and as they did have an age limit, I didn’t want to let those opportunities pass me by. So I persevered through all the sleepless nights, car accidents, and overall stress and made it out the other side.
Once I did get home, I felt I deserved some rest and relaxation. For roughly a year, I didn’t think about programming or game development or job hunting, and focused solely on my home life. My brother came to visit for a few months from New York, so I got to spend time with him. I helped with some construction work around the house and got to reconnect with my family and friends.
I did pursue some other skills during this time. With my last season of drum corps wrapped up at the end of summer 2019, I completed my senior year without touching music at all. So I got back in touch with my musical side and began practicing drums, guitar, and piano again. I tried my hand at learning 3D modeling and animating using Blender and Maya, and at learning digital 2D art with Clip Studio and Krita. I did some livestreaming on Twitch, YouTube and Facebook Gaming for a little while to experience that. Once I secure a full time job, I’ll most likely return to that, as I enjoy playing games in front of an audience. Coming from a Unity background, I took some time to mess around with Unreal Engine 4 and learn some of the processes there. I felt that this was the perfect time to simply experiment with a variety of hobbies and skills and find what sticks.
When I did eventually return to programming, I felt that I had a bit of a renewed interest. I tackled some coding problems on AlgoExpert to get back into the groove, and even did a job interview to get an idea of how the whole application process worked (though I didn’t receive any offers). I took some time to revisit some of my old college projects, notably my Advanced Real-Time Rendering project in Vulkan. I decided to remake it all from scratch and relearn how the API works, and ended up creating a scene-based graphics renderer that you can find here. I’m continuing to update it, as there is a lot to learn and a lot you can use Vulkan for.
And that leaves me where I am today. I am on the hunt for open positions, and am working on projects that I think will help towards finding the right job. I’ll make more posts about my experience with Vulkan, and see where I go from there.
Thanks for sticking around <3
