3 Personal Projects I'm Working On

I have a few big things I'm working on right now that I'm excited about (although they inflict varying degrees of stress as well).

2024 Campaign

The day was June 14, 2019. Joseph, me, and ¿other people? are talking about the Mistborn Adventure Game and how we should totally do a campaign sometime. We recognized that then wasn't the best time as Thomas and I were both about to leave on our missions. So Joseph decreed that 5 years from that day, we would do campaign. A Friday. I remarked, it may be easier to start one day later, but nay! 5 years from that day, we were to do it!

This became an ongoing joke for the years following until actually doing it became more and more solidified. So many more details I could write, and perhaps I will in a separate blog post.

I wish we could get our whole family in on it since many of us love and adore Mistborn, but it's just not possible. Too many conflicting schedules irl, too many characters in-game etc.

I'm running the campaign, so I've been doing a lot of world building, plotting etc. It's been super fun, but definitely stressful at times, since I actually want it to turn out well. Especially because I have no prior DMing experience, I'm nervous -- I'm hoping to do at least one one-shot to get the hang of things before the actual campaign begins.

I reference world-building, and this is because the campaign takes place on an alternate timeline. This timeline is if MAJOR MISTBORN ERA 1 SPOILERS PLEASE DO NOT SPOIL YOURSELF I WILL CRY [black out is not working properly. Removed spoilers. I hope I didn't spoil anyone] Obviously the implications of this are massive, and so there's huge differences. I'm trying to create a world that is realistic to what might actually take place if that took place.

Applying for Internships

This is less of a personal project and more of an important thing that I really need to continually be doing and it's definitely stressful because if I don't get an internship soon, my graduation is just going to be pushed back longer and longer.

I've applied for a good handful so far (10, I think), but I definitely need to just keep grinding away. How time sensitive it is stresses me out. Applying for internships this upcoming summer was best done a month or two ago. Regardless, we press forward. I should honestly set time aside for this every day.

Personal Coding Project -- Ultimate Game Winner

I made this neat thing back during my 2nd semester during one of the first programming classes you take. I think it's neat. The base idea is solving the problem my family runs into where we're like, "But who's the Ultimate Game Winner??"

Over breaks when my family gets together and plays tons of games, sometimes we keep track of who's won each game and such. And at the end, we want to know who's done the best. Couple problems arise, however, when coming up with a way to score. If we just go based off the number of times people have won, there are two major problems: 1. Andrew and I typically play the most games, so we are strongly advantaged. 2. This greatly rewards playing as many quick games as possible.

The purpose of my program is to give you points based on how long the game is, how complex it is, while not rewarding (too heavily) just playing lots and lots of games. There's various math shenanigans going on in the background, but you just input what game was played and who played. It gives points and displays an updated leader board accordingly. If it doesn't recognize the game, you input the length and weight of the game into the system. It remembers the game from now on.

Anyway, point being: I want to make that program but better. I want to because 1. I think it's cool and I want to. 2. It'll help me become a better programmer and 3. Good personal projects look great on a resume.

I have a lot of ideas on how to make it better, but the main two are: 1. Having a GUI (an interface with buttons etc. instead of it being an terminal-based application and 2. Having it automatically scrape data off of boardgamegeek, so you don't have to manually look up and input the data.

I've done a little work with GUI's in the past, but I have a lot to relearn and learn there. Same with scraping data off the internet; I've done a little, but I have a lot to learn. Both seem like very useful things to learn about, though, and I'm excited to do so.

Ooo, the Advent of Code 2023 is coming up as well, so that'll be another thing I'm doing. 25-day coding challenge that takes place leading up to Christmas.