My passion in game development is never lose

I have spend most of my time on OpenGL and Win32 programming since 2002 after finish my C programming lesson in my college. OpenGL and Win32 isn't in my course syllabus but game programming that causes me to pick up for myself. To make a game I must have a game engine up, without game engine it is real hard to roll out a game. In order to build a game engine, the primary element I must know of is graphic programming. I haven't go into other elements like audio, multiplayer, game design, story board, physic and mathematics.

Due to my work load at day job, I really had no time for this. There are so many thing in game programming I got to learn, thus my progress was really slow. Especially when my professional skill wasn't in game development. I understand that building a game engine from ground up is really time consuming. I need to utilize my time effectively. During the long holiday on last week, I found Unity3d. It is a game engine, easy to use (comparing to my previous experience on Vicious Engine), they use MonoDevelop as the engine scripting tool, support JavaScript and C#. I have spend some days (less than a week) to play around with it, I have my game completed, which consist of a spaceship shooting the asteroid, with sound, artwork, physic, and scoring system up and running fine.

Not bad. This engine can safe lots of my time. My passion in game development is never lose. Below is a short video that could motivate me to go stronger in game development.

I feel the great prosperity in 2012

Feeling so great now. Reviewing my pass, it has been a tough time for me. Back to 2010 and 2011, it was a challenging time for me to change my career to be a mobile developer or to be a JAVA developer. Looking at the future of C++, most of the job are mainly focus on mediation work, which is to me, could be a rather boring.

To quickest way to choose my career path is do it together. How? I first started off to get some freelance job on mobile work to test my ability while maintaining my day job. This was a real challenge to me because I got no coding experience on mobile development, yet, my time management is a real sucks.

In the mean time, I start to discover JAVA programming. This is for my next career advancement. Again, this is another tough time for me. Basically I need to focus on 3 things:

1. Mobile programming
2. Java programming.
3. Day job task assignment. (as I required to study C++ Boost programming)

There was a crash time in 2011, when I was in the midst of transitioning my skill from C++ to JAVA, where I need to pick up my skills in Spring and Hibernate while tackling problems in mobile development. Anyhow, I manage to overcome every single issues, thanks to the support from forum on mobile development, and great helps from my architect, Mr. Kah Wai, in boosting up my JAVA skills.

A big thank you to him because he teach me everything on JAVA, and now I am able to work independently and execute every JAVA tasks assigned to me. Since I have joined this company, I have been proposing to adopt some new JAVA technology into the development. I would like to emphasize that I don't know all this thing, just that I knew what need to be done, but I don't know how. I know because my architect told me a lot of issues happened in JAVA development. I really appreciate on the help from him.

Reaching to age 30, it is a next checkpoint on my destination. I am very clear that my direction is on JAVA. Not only that, I am also contributing my work to open source during my free time, and enjoying my hobby in the weekend.

Work life balance. Cheers~

Consider it done! Soldier!

Working in corporate company will having a well known issue, which is the ranking issues. Senior staff will have more privilege to get the very own knowledge whereas lower ranking staff will usually hiding themselves. Why this happen? This is because it has been a culture in the company.

Who say I am not allow to voice out my opinion even though you are more senior than me? Like what happen in my previous company, I challenge my development manager and even the project manager. I took up the challenge because I am ready for it, I will work very hard on it, and be ready to any subsequence impact that might happen in it. Any nonsense, especially those senior staff bluffing at me, I don't care, I just keep moving forward.

I am trying to encourage my team to voice out their opinion, any feedback and critics. Like for example if you found out Birt is much more better than Jasper, go ahead to prove it, make a POC, present to the team, time needed for the implementation, etc.

Just show everything, bring up everything because I know you can. Don't be shy because it just an excuse to hide the problem. You are a very brave soldier, I honour you and salute you. This is the beginning of innovation, creative thinking, not afraid of failure, the team will not growth without these group of soldiers.

I don't care whether there is a glass door shielding the manager's cubicle or they don't. This is a sick culture. I want to change, by moving my first step, bring in the change, growth the team.


Take one more example, I just have 1 year working experience in JAVA, but my team lead very trust on me because I never failed to him. Compare to previous company, I am a very experience C++ programmer, but I am never a senior staff, my opinion in the team are sucks, rubbish, and nonsense. Did you realize the difference? One with many years working experience in C++ and another one is just one year experience in JAVA.


The point is never failed any thing, any tasks that has been assigned to you. "Consider it done! Soldier!" I have this mind set since last year, which is my first year in JAVA. I work very hard to solve every problems, I work non-stop, I work on weekend and public holiday, long working hours. It is a tired process, I know. But I never give up. Now I am acquired the technology and experiences I learned, that's why I never failed anything to my team lead in my current position.


Now is your turn, you have far more working experience in JAVA. Show yourself, soldiers! Let me honour you.

Practice make perfect.

Essay writing is fun and interesting. Remember when I was in primary school, I hate writing just because I am lazy. There was an article mention that if someone not able to write a good essay, this person will lacking of communication skills. Does it true? I don't know. But that is not the reason for me to start writing.

What actually motivate me to start writing is because I feel bore. When I am bore, I read book, after reading, I write down my comment on the reading. As I keep writing, I learn new, the English grammar, new vocabulary, writing style. I started to feel the joy of writing, and reading. And I start writing blog.

To write a good post, I have to keep on practice non stop. No one is number one when first born, keep on learning, practicing, read more, and explore all kind of reading will make someone perfect in writing.

Happy Saturday :o)

Internet is really a wasting time thing in my life.

Internet is really a wasting time thing in my life. It has been a long time I take myself off from the Facebook, after that I control on the chat program usage, and recently I started to control myself on the Internet usage. I started to realize that I have been abuse the usage of the Internet because every time I go online, first thing to do is to turn on the chat program, and then mail client, after that facebook, youtube, and read blog post. I've been feeling so lost and frustrate because there are tons of information pushing into my head. Thus I am thinking set up a security control to lock myself down.

Now I have my initiative to control on the Internet usage. When every time I want to use the Internet, I have a log book jotting down the objective of the Internet usage, and time of usage. For example now I'm writing my journey in this blog, it took about 15mins to complete, and 5mins on reviewing my sentence and English grammar checking.

Doing this will required self discipline, and I'm feeling so great that I could get out from the crowd.

How can I do better in my job?

Ever wonder how can I do better in my job? Beside helping up the team, R&D support, programming tips, what else I can do? How can I bring my best service to the team, beside consulting their code? Should I code for them? Or inspire them to code hard?

Feeling disappoint

I really feeling so disappointed to myself because I have totally stop studying open source. Now I am spending most of my time on JSP, chasing myself to learn more about web development beside JAVA. I think this is due to my time planning and development, beside coding skill, it is good to have some soft skill like time management skill to complete myself. I need to consider about that.

Good luck.

I never had a though of web development.

Never think about web development is far more advance than my expectation. I am C programmer since 2003, I know C and C++ ins and outs, pretty well. When come to web, I only know yahoo.com. Never think about how to make something like yahoo.com, never think about JAVA, never think about JavaScript is so hard to learn, never think about dynamic web-page design, and never think about database.

Need more improvement to Android developer

Trying to search a good app for printing purpose for my tablet this morning. I found out that there are plenty of apps from android market but the quality isn't really that good if compare to iOS.

Part of the reason is that quality control on Apple is very strict, just like Bada, one of my app until now (since last year) still couldn't get approval from Samsung. Indirectly this give me an impression that Android app's quality is not up to the standard.

The quality issue could be partly due to the particular Android developer. They should take up the responsibility. I am a programmer too, when issue is in front of me, I will take the initiative to solve it as soon as possible. I can even skip lunch, stop facebook update, lock myself in a room, full time concentrate to the particular problem, fixed it, and deliver on time.

I think all developer (especially open source developer) should be self discipline in order to deliver a quality software. We can even compete with Enterprise software if the product is good in one day.

I do understand that there are developer very jealous to Apple, some of them even anti-Apple group. I do understand that Android developer have creative idea, without quality control, a creative idea is equivalent to rubbish at the end.

Lets learn together, lets improve together to bring up the open source community up to a quality standard. Good luck to all open source developer.

Facebook is equavalent to Apple

Recently there are many nonsense in Facebook. In the same time, I keep updating my nonsense as well. At the end everyone is publishing nonsense into it, and commenting on the nonsense. But so interesting that everyone is looking good into Facebook share. This remind me that even though Macbook Pro doesn't has an up-to-date hardware spec, but there are still people died died say it is a good product.

:o)

Any good use of Facebook?

Facebook is a famous term in nowadays where everyone of my friends know about it. Even smartphone producer are bringing Facebook as part of their phone feature.

I register a Facebook account in 2009 and has been very active in Facebook in late of 2010 until 2011. My impression to this platform was that Facebook is something like ICQ + web 2.0. I am not a fans of ICQ but I was very active in forums like CodeProject.com, CodeGuru.com, GameDev.net, and nehe.GameDev.net. These are a few forum sites which I was very active before I know about Facebook.

It was very interesting when I first joined Facebook, sooner in late of 2010, I am trying to make it as a news feed just like Google Reader where I subscribe all my favorite sites and trying to make it as a knowledge sharing platform just like a forums. I was very active in this activity so called 'Facebook Forum customization' in 2011 because my job environment allowing me to surf Facebook during working hour. I was almost logging into Facebook every day to read my 'customize' news feeds.

Anyhow the 'Facebook Forum' response was very low. It was totally out of my expectation, even worse there are a lot more rubbish, nonsense and annoying news feeds posting on my Facebook wall and everyone's Facebook wall. At first I though that I was sharing some knowledge to others but I was bringing nonsense to others in the same time. Eventually, we are wasting time reading nonsense on Facebook.

I was trying my best to utilize this platform but at last, I started to realize that forum is much more better than Facebook because what I need is knowledge whereas Facebook is suit for marketing purpose.

I'm still trying to find the good use of Facebook.

Set up the perimeter!

Over the month, I have contribute to the team in setting up the source control server, deployment server, and build server, there are one more thing I need to set up, which is test server. Currently there is no test system in the software which I was quite worrying now. I think not put too far for now, let the human do the manual test for us. At least the basic requirement for development is ready, our team should be able to fight for long run!

Microsoft has improve the search engine!

I don't know what is Mach-O, thus I was trying to make a search using the two popular search engine, Bing and Google. And I type the following text in the search box:

What is Mach-O

Bing gave me general English term. Google gave me everything that are related to Mach plus "O". If take a closer look at the left panel in Bing's search page, there is a section on related searches. I can find my search result over there. Just that it organise or categories it in such a way that more targeted to different view point. Take a closer look at Google's search result, my expected output was park at the first entry. The rest of the entries are the search result for English term. To be frank, my expected search result from Google always park at the first entry.

I just wonder if Bing could replace my default search engine which is Google...

Dedicate Worker and Skill Professional

It has been a hard time for me over the past three weeks. I was busy in bringing up the UAT environment and setting up the SVN server. Every time I successfully deploy a workable app into the UAT environment, this developer will pull the UAT down few days later. I bring it up again, this developer pull it down again. As a team, I trust this developer. But when this issue happen again and again, I am just curious to know whether this developer is lying to us.

As according to my supervisor, this developer has about eight years of working experience in IT, and six years experience in JAVA. (Two years went off to start up a business but failed, now joined us as a JAVA developer.) I don’t see any problem with such a great wealth of knowledge developer in the team, but looking at the work, and the result of the work, I really can’t find anymore excuse in protecting this developer.

I wasn’t a great JAVA developer (only have a year experience), but I manage to bring up the UAT and SVN by keep trying and trying hard all day and night. I even sacrifice my weekend to research and study WAS and Apache SVN to ensure the project is well control. This developer is the owners who build everything from the ground and blaming to infrastructure team that is their responsibility to make it up. This developer is a JAVA professional, I feel so disappointed to this professional.

Although I wasn’t a qualified JAVA developer, but at least, I willing to work hard, trying hard to experiment all the possibility. Bear all the responsibility to make the UAT up; bring up the source control server. That is how I earned the credits trust from my superior, project manager, and Integration team. It wasn’t because of I know more about the WAS thing or SVN thing, it just that I willing to work hard.

What motivate me to continue my hard work, I have been granted the name “crazy dare soldier” in the team from my supervisor, and “unofficial team lead” from my project manager.

Moral learned from this incident, professional doesn’t mean good in the team, but never, ever look down to un-certified programmer.

The Objective

Few months ago, my ex-colleague, Wilson Mak, sent me an interesting youtube video which really inspiring me a lot. The title of that video is called Try Something New for 30 Days. This video is about how can I have my goal set and stick to it until it is done in 30 days. In the long run, I could gain a big change on myself.

I didn't sure how effective it is, but I did try it for one month, which is studying struts framework in just 30 days. Sound like mission impossible to me. Anyhow, the conclusion was failed because I don't have much time allocate into it.

One thing I am pretty sure is by having an objective set to myself with a duration of one year. I had been doing this for about 4-5 years. Every company I joined must have an objective set into it, and I will reviewing it once a year to see whether my objective has been achieve? Or need to stay for another year in order to get the objective done? Once I found my career has stagnate and not moving, first I will talk to my superior on my career path. If the situation couldn't improve, then only I will decide to move on. What if the objective can be achieve by reassigning me a new task? Definitely I will stay, for another year, and then review it again.

I always remember this: I am not working for you nor your company, I am working for my objective.

As of 2011, I had made my first move into JAVA stack. I only left 20 years for me to code. I am running out of time now. I can not wait for another 10 years to get myself certified as a J2EE developer, I need to have a 30 days plan. Plan it short so that I can achieve my objective earlier.

Diary evolution

Diary, is a activity that could help me in writing a good essay during my school. By practicing it daily, one short paragraph (approximately 30-40 words) in a day, it could be various topics happen in my life, I will gain a wealth skills in essay writing. This is what teacher told me in school.

My diary book consist of small exercise book, a various kind of look and feel bought from gift shop, professional executive diary, hard cover, soft cover, thick one, thin one, cheap one, and expensive one. The smallest one I been using for my diary is '555' pocket notebook. I used to carry it along with me, write everything at everywhere. Due to the size is so small, I couldn't write much thing in it. And I give up using it.

As my age growth, my diary writing getting lesser and lesser. One of the reason is I am no longer need it to write a good essay, no more worry about scoring. At one time, I'm totally stop writing anything. Because I felt annoying in writing dairy.

I'm using Excel to write my diary recently, with three columns in it, one for date, one for time, and one for activity. Keep the content short to one to three sentences. My new way of writing dairy. Have been practicing it for 2 months. It is just so interesting to write. And it could be my time logger as well. Inspecting where my time spend on or waste on. With the help of smartphone device and cloud service, I can carry it anywhere, write anytime, and retrieve on the go.

At last, I no need to worry about how my diary should keep, and it save a lot of space in my bookshelf.

Joke of the day

This joke is cheering up my day. :o)

Using DuckDuckGo search engine

Today, I am not using Google because I'm trying duckduckgo search engine. I was so surprise on the search result because I feel more comfortable on the result than Google. I doesn't mean Google doesn't do its job. Let's start the test:

How to start JSP page?

My intention of this question is to ask the expert on how could I write a JSP code and then render it on the web browser.

I ask Google, RoseIndia tutorial is return in the 1st entry of the list. This page is giving a tutorial on writing the JSP code, the require server in order to run the JSP, the tool need to build a JSP, but it doesn't teach on how to upload the JSP into a server.

I ask DuckDuckGo, DeniWeb forum is return in the 1st entry of the list. This page returning a search result of a forum. That guy asking the same question as mine. Not exactly the word but have the same meaning of mine. This page doesn't show the exact result of my search, but the answer reply from the thread already provide me the clue for my search.

To conclude my investigation, I found out that the result return from DuckDuckGo are more focus on discussion forum search. Whereas Google are more focus on the resource search. Another good thing about DuckDuckGo is the search page is auto load when reach to the end of the page and support keystroke interaction too. ;)

Information overload

What is Information overload?

This happen when you have collect too much information on hand but you don’t need all of them.


Below is the list of symptoms of Information overload

Stress You have done a lot of search, but it seems to be that you have not enough time to read it or there are still missing part.
Poor memory No matter how hard you have read and how hard you force yourself to memorize something, you still not able to recall it.
Inattentive You are not able to concentrate on one thing and get distracted easily.


Here are some tips that may help you out

1. Plan your purpose of acquiring the information.
2. Organise your work and get rid of clutter on your table.
3. Put aside the information that is not relevant to you.
4. Try to focus, ignore those chat lines, idle gossip, and surfing the Internet aimlessly.
5. Focus on one task at a time and complete it before starting a new task.

Improve your memory

• Listen to Baroque music. This type of music has tempo ranges from 55 to 65 beats per minute. It has a frequency of 500 hertz that can harmonies your brain waves, causing our bodies become relaxed and minds alert. One example is Pachelbel.
• Use music as a memory aid. Music could be a powerful memory trigger.
• Speed up your reading. An average person can have a reading speed of 200 to 250 words per minute (wpm). There are three attributes showing that you are a slow reading person. First, read word by word. This will cause your eye strain, and boring. Second, sub-vocalise when reading. This will reduce the reading rate because muscular activity tires you out. Third, re-read earlier section waste time and slow down your reading rate.

Speeding up your reading

• Read groups of word. This is to reduce pausing as you read.
• Minimise sub-vocalise. Reading either aloud or silently was a bad habit.
• Reduce regression. Don’t go backwards when you read and force yourself to finishing your reading. Try stop at a section if not whole chapter.
• Focus and avoid any temptation. Choose the most productive time for your reading. E.g. early in the morning.

JOURNAL

Since I started publish my writing on the blog, I found out that writing was so enjoying to myself. At the beginning of writing the blog, I was so frustrate because I don't know how to present my thinking in the brain onto the paper. Thus there are few post at the beginning of this blog was so boring and the grammar are bad. The situation become even worst when I need to use English to present my thinking since I am not familiar with English especially those grammar.

But now I am getting comfortable with it. This is due to the experience in my writing, and keep practicing it, doing self review after each writing, and doing a lot of grammar checking through the Internet. All these effort are pay off to myself.

Recently I found another type of writing, called Journal. What the hell was that? I did some search using Google and Bing, they are many type of it from the search. Each type of journal will serve for different purpose. I am not going to talk about each of them here. But I am trying to give my own definition about this term, which is more suitable to myself I guess.

The definition:
It is a writing of your study on a subject together with your thinking about the subject and come up with your own specify opinion or suggestion on it.

This is true. Journal could be a good tool to keep track of your study and also your finding about the subject.