Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Learning Objective-C

I think the hardest thing about the job search is that it is almost impossible to learn anything new because I am jumping around doing various things that could make me a stronger candidate. These activities include: improving my HB project, practicing white-boarding, doing code challenges, reviewing concepts I learned but have forgotten because I have been jumping around so much. What's frustrating about these activities is that every company has a different idea of how they would like to measure my potential as a developer, so at any given interview, maybe only one of these prep activities is actually beneficial.

In the mean time, there are so many things I'd like to learn in my spare time because it is a fun challenge, such as making mobile apps, learning more hardware stuff, understanding how memory allocation works, playing with big data, learning fun data visualization stuff, etc. I think I am just really anxious to stop dabbling in so many different things and start learning one particular thing on a deeper level. But I don't feel like I can do that while I am searching for a job.

When I do get a job, I think I will be so heavily immersed in learning that I will feel really challenged and really satisfied with what I am doing. I am really excited to have that. I need to find a great company that supports my love of learning and wants to help me grow as a programmer and a developer. I can't wait to focus on learning rather than on job searching.

Aaaaaaaanyway, to make a short story long, I needed a break from interview prep so I spent all of today learning Objective-C. It's really not much more complicated than Python. JUST KIDDING!!! It's soooo much more complicated than Python. Holy monkey. But I really really want to build an iPhone app and I'm determined to figure it out. For my readers who haven't yet discovered how much fun programming is, here is a simple comparison of Python code and Objective-C code:

Python:
apples = 25
print apples

Objective-C:
NSUInteger apples = @25;
NSLog(@"%lu", apples);

Note that the Objective-C code looks like swearing. Coincidence? I think not. But code school's Objective-C lessons are really fun and I am almost finished with them. When I'm done I'm going to work on a Stanford class on iPhone apps and supposedly you get to build an app after the first few lectures. Yay! For now, I am enjoying feeling like a spy writing secret coded messages. And hopefully soon when I make an extremely simple thing work on my iphone, I will feel like a powerful evil scientist taking over the world. Man, I love programming :)

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

My Game is Deployed!

My game is now deployed and in a condition such that people could actually play it! There are still many things I want to add someday, but job searching is a full-time job. I plan to continue working on this project once I get settled in somewhere. Please be patient if the game runs slowly. Enjoy!