First blog post in a long, long time.

Started rekindling my love for code and development after reading the Clean Coder again.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve let my love of code dissolve a bit and some professionalism too if I’m honest. But let’s focus on the passion for now.

Roughly 7 hours of anything a day is more than enough for anyone. But as employed programmers, we spend that long on code doing someone else’s design and vision and over time the love of code fades because you’re coding 7 hours a day doing stuff you probably wouldn’t choose to do. Every now and then something exciting might happen but then it’s gone. Or worse, you’re under pressure to get it done quickly and so there’s no time to enjoy it.

And this is where my love of code started to dissolve. I’m trained, experienced and passionate about low level coding. My passion has always been for graphics programming and tooling. It's a shame that I have had so little time to do any real graphics programming professionally because it's the one area I've always been very keen to get into. All the graphics programming I have done professionally is simple stuff, particle systems, maths functions for rendering interesting things, fluid systems. Simple, because I'm not exploring the actual pipeline for complicated issues, just applying maths in funky ways to achieve desired effects. I'm sorry I'm so bad at Waffle.

Where was I...

I’m also a programmer in a start-up, and you wear a lot of hats in a start-up. So, I’m a programmer primarily, but I also switch between, dev ops, cloud developer, full stack developer, project manager, designer, AI Engineering (More on that another time), and whatever else needs to be done. Obviously, the load is shared by the small and dedicated team there, but everyone does a bit of everything.

So, since a few weeks back, I have been rekindling the love of an old friend. New website, built with Svelte kit, hosted via Netlify. No barriers or annoying APIs in the way so I can just write a shader and plonk it in. It's a static site too so should be nice and cheap. And I believe there should be no tracking analytics or cookies.

I hope to add other stuff later, maybe some sort of game, or more shaders. I dunno, it’s early days again and I’ve got no clear direction.

Enough waffle, I’ll get into it. I’ve got lots I want to share and talk about here. Both for my future reference but also for anyone willing to read. Sharing is caring.

Topics I hope to cover in this blog over time.

Stuff we all experience like skill fade, saying yes, saying no, momentum, chaos, shortcuts, AI madness and its effect on industry and development in general.

And then stuff that it a bit less broad. What it’s like branching out into other areas like Full stack development and cloud development. Two very different professions to being a Software Engineer. Yes, code is there. That’s about all there is in common. The irony of both being that they look at each other as if they’re wizards.

But first, I’m kicking off with a fun project that I started last week. Something to get me right back to when I was at my peak love of code. 2nd year of Uni doing the amazing API module and Maths module.

The fun project is a Vulkan renderer with a custom pipeline. After nearly 6 hours of on and off work, I’m halfway to drawing a triangle. The API just expects you to be explicit about what you want it to do. I could just clone a Vulkan renderer or just copy paste the tutorial but who learns from that? I could just get AI to do it these days, and get some garbage that seems to work. But I want to understand the Vulkan API because I need to for what I plan to do. I also am taking my time with it, did some custom stuff to make the log pretty so I could clearly see errors and what not too so there is a reason it feels like its taking me longer than it should. You catch errors and explore things better whilst you're learning that way.

The plan is to make a renderer that can bend the light rays through the scene. So black holes, and worm holes like the Einstein-Rosen bridge. I’ve warped the space before with a raymarching shader and signed distance field primitives in WebGL before, but this project is a little more advanced.

This new plan means that the shapes need to be bent before lighting is calculated I think.

While I was planning this, I realised that everything would be back to front and upside down when looking through a worm hole which is quite interesting. And I know light isn’t supposed to be able to escape a black hole, but this is just a bit of fun maths practice and API practice so we’ll see what happens.

Where I’m at?

Just finished defining all the rules for the graphics card and logical processes. Queue families, extensions, swap chain etc. I still need to define buffers and do shaders and loads of stuff, but I gotta finish drawing a triangle. Then the mesh classes and loading the meshes and a texture class, so I know I can draw a standard scene in Vulkan. Then I can get started on the first hurdles of ray tracing and lighting.

My initial plan was for the vertex and fragment shader to do their jobs of defining the positions and verts and faces and then bend the edges. But I can already see this isn’t going to work without something like tessellation. And I don’t think that’s right either. Either way, this is going to be a fun and interesting journey. If I get the tech down, maybe I can make a simple puzzle game out of it.

Anyway. First post since 2022 or whatever DONE. I know this is a bit of a boring one with all the waffle, but I promise they will get more interesting. Now that the website is up again, I just wanted to get something up. (To test the new blog system too)