DONE! I have been doing this since New Years day and I finished. Hooray!
Anyway, today’s exercise was triangle in python. Check to see if the given side lengths form an isosceles, scalene, or equilateral triangle. Not hard although I think I gold plated it a bit. Not as much as a community solution which turned the equivalent of my is_triangle() function into a decorator. Gotta figure out how to make my own decorators some time.
I decided to extend yesterday’s little project, and added an OBJ file loader. I tried adding texture mapping but the texture coordinates don’t seem to be making sense. Granted I just made up a texture so there is that. I also tried loading the Stanford dragon but that was way too slow and I couldn’t make out much since I don’t have proper lighting. I probably should have been using shaders and vertex buffers which is why everything is so slow. Anyway I like the Utah Teapot so it is today’s star.
It looks like I got another exercism award. This one is Persistent Perfectionist for submitting revisions for 20 exercises. Today’s PHP was a simple exercise (GO was a hard one). I thought I did it well but when I checked against others they had it as basically a one-liner. So I had to update to match. I couldn’t let that stand when PHP has a dedicated function to do the string translation (it was DNA to RNA by the way).
I am really disappointed by the books I have been buying on Amazon lately.
The WebGL book I got was a mess, there is no complete sample code in the book or on the web that I am aware of and it doesn’t give you enough to boiler plate to do the exercises it wants you to do at the end of the chapter. There are only code snippets in the book. It got me to look elsewhere for code to do the exercises but it disheartened me before I got half way through. I still want to go back and update my python teapot example with the updated code at some point.
My Azure book has an insane font that makes my head hurt reading it. The lower case i doesn’t have a dot on it, making things frustrating to read. It is strangely bold and large too. Also, I am thinking it is not giving me the full meat, this seems a too simple so far. Why do the job applications need you to have five years experience if it is just clicking buttons. I will get back to that one eventually, hopefully it gets better.
My second AI book has me asking why it is even using AI. I know it may be to illustrate a point and their might be savings later but he wants to generate a letter and spends several pages making prompts longer than the letter he is generating to generate the letter. Then he has several back and forth conversations with the AI to get it to not sound like a robot. It would have been much faster to just write the letter. Also when he is done the AI is suddenly blocking out days for a follow up without ever looking at the author’s calendar. <Old man>Do kids these days not know how to write a three to four paragraph letter?</Old man> I am not sure it even has the AI code generations stuff I wanted. I may have goofed up there by not reading the description well enough.
All of that is to say I ordered yet another book (I think I have a problem). This one is for Laravel. I am nearly two-thirds through the PHP track on exercism, and I want to do a project with PHP as a capstone project of sorts. Not sure what it will be yet. Something to-do list-like.
I only have 10 exercises left in GO (all hard, and I will be using prior solutions as a guide, sorry). Then I can start on the Making an Interpreter in Go and Making a Compiler in Go books in earnest.
I got this award for doing five exercises in an app-building language. What exactly is an app-building language. Not sure so I went searching. I found a post about it from exercism back in 2023.
Well it can mean a number of things:
Web applications, the bread and butter of a lot of our days now
Native apps like those that run on your phone or tablet
Desktop apps that directly run on your Windows, Mac or Linux operating system
Domain specific applications
Business applications
And more!
So what are the languages?
We’re looking at a whopping 14 languages: ABAP, CoffeeScript, Dart, Delphi, Elm, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Objective-C, PHP, PureScript, ReasonML, Swift and TypeScript.
Seems like GO should be on the list but I probably got it for PHP. It looks like there was a whole year of awards, and they are still active.
Do I want to see if I can get another month award? The languages for September are not favorites. I could maybe try AWK. If I do it seems like I am supposed to do Gigasecond, Atbash Cipher, Darts, Luhn, and Series exercises. I don’t know anything about AWK but it sounds better than Forth and Perl variants.
Looking back at my awards I do have Analytical April and Object Oriented October, so I am already a quarter of the way there.
I also got this one for finishing half of the exercises on the PHP track. PHP turned out to be quite a bit nicer than I expected, but I still haven’t got a working debugger with it, and I had to figure out how to get PHP Unit running more than once. Not sure what I am going to do when I get to exercises where echoing variables won’t cut it.
I do have the physical make code arcade player now. I haven’t done anything with it yet. I still need to get compiling working locally, and set up the device. I think I want to try making a no-name Tetris for it.
I just got another award on the PHP track. Studious Student means I looked at at least 50 community solutions. The tracks I am currently working on are Go at 69.09% (51 remaining), and PHP at 31.03% (80 remaining).
Sunday, I should have a make code arcadeconsole from amazon delivered. I have tried to get local dev setup so I don’t have to sign onerous agreements. So far I can run it but not compile it to a binary. I think I need to install more stuff.
I thought it might be neat if I made a few games for it. If I did, I could buy some more, upload my games to them and maybe give some away to tech minded kids for Christmas. Just a thought not sure if I will get that far. A bouncing logo is all I have made so far.
I am still rough around the edges in PHP. I am only learning it for resume fodder. Today I did some regex just because I could. It was strange that the GO and PHP track both got the Crypto Square exercise one after the other.
I still need two more PHP exercises before its percentage passes up what I did in the Ruby track years ago. I guess my numbers were off in the previous post. Anyway, a new trophy, hooray!
I really should learn Laravel if I am going to make PHP learning proper resume fodder. Can you think of any web apps that are easy but not a to-do list? I may go to the library and see if I can find a book on it.
Update from the next day: PHP is now ahead of Ruby in my exercism.org track rankings. Also similar to the Crypto Square synchronization from yesterday, I had Diamond exercise on PHP yesterday, and today it was the next exercise on the Go track. Spooky that you have the same exercise on two different tracks so close together two days in a row.
Hey, I got yet another award. This time in GO for doing revisions to problem solutions. The changes were based on things I liked better that other people did in community solutions. Go me.
The PHP track is starting to catch up to the Ruby track, and may pass it in two exercises. Go is fourteen away from the two-thirds mark.
