Friday, August 29, 2008

I'm really confused

I guess the title explains it: I'm confused.

I just can't seam to commit to a project because I want to work on Deviyo, but when I do decide to work on Deviyo, I don't know where to start.

Maybe the idea of Deviyo needs to be narrowed down, at least in the beginning, that's what I'm thinking right now but, I don't know which part to start with, I don't even know what the parts are :(

How can you plan a big project like this? It seams impossible, but I'm determined to find a way, and with God's help I will.

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Alan Kay

I'll start by saying "I LOVE OOP"!

It's just amazing! I can't imagine myself writing Claire without using OOP! And I feel so grateful to Alan Kay who coined the term object-oriented programming!

I don't know how I used to live without OOP! I'm not an expert in it yet, I still have difficulties designing an app with OOP but I'm getting used to it.

Pleasure of programming!

Remember I said I got rejected by programming but I'll keep fighting for it? Well, today it finally started to work out: I was working on Claire, trying my best to create an application with OOP and I finally did it! I have two classes, one interface and one MXML file that all "work together in a magical way" :)

I'm so excited! If I wasn't so sleepy I'd be jumping all over the room like I usually do when I accomplish something.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

OK, so I'm a nerd!

Yesterday I was chatting with my friend and she said she's preparing for her SAT tests in Oct, next thing I know: I'm solving practice SAT questions for fun! :(

Not only that but I found most math questions super easy :/ I thought the questions were actually easy so I gave one of the questions to my friends to solve but... Apparently it's only me.

The weird thing is that I don't get high grades, I barely passed chem in my HS exams...

Great! I just got the answer to one question I couldn't answer yesterday :(

I don't know if I should be happy about this or not.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Best birthday gift

I'm chatting with my best friend from Iraq, we've studied together from kindergarten to 3rd yeah HS, we're really close, I haven't talked to him in over 9 months now.

Anyways, that's not the interesting thing, the interesting thing is that he says that the situation in Iraq is getting better, last time I talked to him he said it was really bad, they moved to another area because his area (where I was staying too) is really bad, he said the safety is really bad, lots of bombings and all.

Today he said they've moved back to our area a month ago, he says al qaeda people are going down, they managed to kick them out of our area which is really good, he says there hasn't been any explosions since they moved back, the shops are open till late at night (which would have been a miracle when I was still there three and a half years ago), he stays out till 12 am which, again, something that no sane man would do.

It's the best birthday gift ever :)

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Toolmaking Predilection

So the day before yesterday I started working on Claire, it's something new in the programming world that should cause programmers to make less bugs, you can find more about it here.

Today, I started thinking about how I'm going to manage my time to work on both Claire and Deviyo, then only I realized that, the reason I got the idea in the first place is because I had problems with Deviyo, I started creating Claire to make developing Deviyo easier, suddenly, something I read in Dreaming in Code came to my mind, here it is:

In software management, coordination is not an afterthought or an ancillary matter; it is the heart of the work, and deciding what tools and methods to use can make or break a project. But getting sidetracked in managing those tools is a patent temptation. When the cry of "Let's build it ourselves!" arises, geeks are all too happy to rally and cheer. A celebrated (and perhaps apocryphal) bit of graffiti from MIT captures this: "I would rather write programs to help me write programs than write programs." Similarly, there is a saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln: "Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe." This principle, which found its way into the business advise manual The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, appeals to every programmer's passion for toolmaking. But if it becomes an end in itself, it can drive the best-organized projects into a ditch.

I don't know what to say, that book is amazing! Everything it mentions seams to be true, I'm so happy I bought it, it's the only book I bought, usually I either borrow books or get free e-books from the Internet and print them.

Monday, August 11, 2008

Falling in Love with Programming

The other day I was reading Dreaming in Code, it's a book that talks about software development and why we still have bugs after more than half a decade since the invention of computers, when I found a saying by Jaron Lanier that I've been thinking about since I learned about OOP, here's what he said "We start off writing little programs--'Hello World,' or whatever it might be. Everyone has a wonderful experience. They start to love computers. They've done some little thing that's just marvelous. How do you get over that first love? It sets the course for the rest of your career. And yet, as you scale up, everything just degenerates."

It's true, I started programming when I was 8! I started with BASIC, just writing sentences that are executed one after the other from top to bottom. Then I was introduced to VB, I never knew about classes or anything then, I just dragged controls to the form, I set their properties, put code in events and voila! I have a working GUI application, which is probably why people recommend against it for beginners.

Then I moved to C, there were some features that I wasn't aware of (recursion, pointers, etc) but that wasn't hard to get used to.

Then came C++, I borrowed a book from the library and started reading it, I thought the only difference was just in the sentences and the libraries used (iostream, cout, cin, etc) but then I reached chapter 7, it started talking about OOP, it was complicated and I started thinking "Why on earth would I want to learn this?", so I just read it because I didn't want to skip anything, what made it worse is that chapter 9 (chapter 8 is about OOP too) was about programming for windows which is the main reason why I borrowed the book.

It wasn't until recently when I started using Flex and started planning for Deviyo that I realized that OOP is important.

All this time I've been in love with programming, I used to think it's the coolest thing on earth, I'm taking a course in IT, I'm convinced it's what I'll be doing for a living.

The result is? I fell in love with programming, it rejected me and I can't seam to get over it, but I'll keep fighting for it.

Sunday, August 10, 2008

Ideas are killing me!

I have so many ideas and so many potential projects and they're all simple but "revolutionary" if they work and I don't know which ones to try to do and which ones will be a waste of time.

Here are some of the ideas I have:
1. 3D TV: You've seen one of those 3D TVs that don't need glasses, right? I have an idea to create one,it's simple but... It's too simple to be true.
2. Holographic displays: Yup! The idea I have, scientifically, should work, but I can't find any references to it online. And again, if it can be done then it's just amazing that no one has thought of it before.
3. Deviyo: *rolls eyes* Yes, it is revolutionary if it works like I hope it does.
4. Graphical programming: Uh... I can't explain this more because someone might just do it, but lets just say it'll make bugs much less.

AND MORE! GOD! I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH ALL OF THESE IDEAS!

Friday, August 1, 2008

Now what?

OK, so I'm back from my "vacation", it was nice, I had lots of fun but I'm starting to wonder what I'm gonna do now.

Should I work on Deviyo? Should I read the book I downloaded about design patterns in Actionscript 3? What about the game of the generals? I don't know.

The most probable thing is that I will try to finish reading the book ASAP and then I'll resume working on Deviyo, meanwhile, I'll be working on GoG especially that I received an email from a guy asking about it :)

That's all for now.