Twelve’s Design
So… almost two months have passed since my last update. I overbooked myself last month, but I’m back. I’ve almost finished Chapter 4 of Twelve’s Design and am transitioning into Chapter 5. Well, I’ve made the decision to break the book into more chapters, so Chapter 4 will become Chapters 5 and 6 and Chapter 5 will be Chapters 7 and 8. I’ll probably think of the book in terms of the old numbering scheme for a while longer though since my notes are organized that way. I hope more chapters will smooth out Chapter 5, which has a ton of stuff in it, and other messy chapters in the second half of the book. It does make me sad that Twelve’s Design will no longer have twelve chapters. I can live with either two groups of twelve chapters or three groups of six chapters though. >:D
OokiiSoraCon Web App
I hosted the OokiiSoraCon website for pre-convention testing purposes… somewhere on this domain. I’ll keep it secret for now because, while I did follow a security-minded tutorial to implement it, I don’t know how secure it really is. Now I’m squashing bugs and implementing requests as revealed by the members of the OokiiSoraCon staff that tested it. I question if an OokiiSoraCon video game will happen this year, but we’ll at least have THIS. You’ll have to come to the convention to find out what. 😛
The Writer’s Net
I’ve mostly finished implementing the React half of The Writer’s Net. All I have left to do is finish implementing the map. For some dumb reason, I decided to update my old code to the newest version of D3 while also refactoring it for use as a JavaScript module. So, adding it to the application hasn’t been as simple as importing it into the project and attaching the right connections. When I first started this React implementation of The Writer’s Net though, I had no idea how those connections would even work. Refactoring the code has helped solidify that. Now I just have to get it work!
The time I’ve spent learning the other technologies the NuCamp class has moved onto, however, has also slowed development. While I don’t exactly feel comfortable building mobile applications yet, I at least got familiar with React Native last month. Now we’re learning NodeJS, Express, and MongoDB for the backend logic and database portion of the JavaScript MERP stack. I have no idea what the best practices are for designing a database that stores redundant data intentionally, and it doesn’t look like the class will delve into it, so I guess I have more outside research to do to finish The Writer’s Net. I graduate mid-July, so we’ll see if I can at least have the application basically working by then.
Elysium
Something amazing and completely unexpected happened last month. I received an email from Matt and Adam Rovner, the co-writers of Elysium (2003)’s original script. They discovered the articles I wrote on the film and wanted to tell me what they know about its history. O.O Since then, we’ve run into multiple scheduling conflicts, but you can bet that when we get a meeting together, I’m writing another Elysium article. In the meantime, if you have any Elysium-related questions you must have answered, send me a Tweet @SilentFuzzle. 🙂