perpetualcode

Procrastination, Perfection, Questions, and Discussions

Okay, I’ll admit it. I find it incredibly hard to write informative posts. The problem is, the majority topics I have in mind are essentially unanswered questions. I’ve been holding off on posting them (sometimes throwing them up on twitter) because I don’t feel that it helps to have those questions on here. I’m likely wrong — I’m a bizarre breed of perfectionist who doesn’t want anyone to see what I’m working on till it’s done and polished. Dangerous, I know. It’s a habit I’m trying to break.

Secondly, outside of having all these questions but no answers or analysis (yet), I find it hard to write about a topic without it becoming a debate. I like discussion of ideas. I think that’s how good ideas are formed and tested. Therefore I tend to play devil’s advocate against myself, all the time. Sometimes good things come of it, but generally it causes my progress to stall. Once again, if I can express my predicament in 140 chars, I poke twitter to see if anyone weighs in on a perspective.

I’m now on holiday break until the new year, so I’m going to push to at least answer, or discuss, one of the questions I’ve noted down before returning to work.

Here’s some of the ideas I’ve jotted down (in no particular order):

• Avoiding Burnout – I’ve come close to completely burning myself out. I’d like to point out the signs and some of the things I have done to get back on the ball.
• Comparison of event handling models – Fairly broad topic, but I’ve seen event handling used in great ways and terrible ways.
• Using Scaleform GFx effectively – Not sure if I can legally write about this, but I’ve been using GFx for most of my career (version 1.0 through 4.0) and would like to bring to light some Do’s and Don’ts when architecting a UI system with this middleware.
• OpenGL 4 Tutorial – Already underway, I’m using the process of writing a tutorial to re-learn graphics programming in a world without the fixed function (my knowledge is so dated) and also provide a comprehensive guide to newbies, since there’s a complete lack of OGL4 tutorials available. (NeHe was great back in the day, I hope to achieve that level of quality.)
• Logging and Assertions – What’s the difference between the two? Are they fundamentally the same? Can the system be unified? Assert, Error, Warn, Info, Debug, etc – how are these levels defined? What’s the difference between Assert and Error?
• Atomic operations and syncronization primitives – Also an exercise in learning more about them myself, I hope to generate a resource for others, too.