If I Only Had A Brain: 2018 CppSAN WG21 Trip Report

This is a short report on my experience from attending the WG21 2018 San Diego meeting. Some warnings though..

  • I’m a very infrequent WG21 in-person attendee. The last time I attended was in Chicago 2013, and that was for one day. This time I managed to attend for three days.
  • My main goal for going this time was to present for discussion P1177 and P1178. Both proposals for SG15, or so I thought when I first wrote them. But as we all know.. Plans are obsolete the moment they are conceived.
  • My feeling towards the worth of attending are mixed, more on that below. I say that, from the context that I attend these things by taking vacation and paying for my own way (I do have to thank my employer, Disbelief LLC, for paying one work day).
  • The only order below is relative to what I feel is least to most important to me personally. I hope you will read to the end (or if you are impatient just skip there).

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Most Valuable Resource Award goes to: ACTIVISTS!

Here we are in a new year, with a new US Congress and new US President. And with a majority of the US population rather unhappy about that new government. Which makes for a whole gaggle of activists spending their time and money to attempt to change the situation we are in. Upwards of 3.5 million of them around the US demonstrated in the name of equal rights on Saturday the 21st of January 2017. Including the 250 thousand I, and my 7 year old daughter, and my rather overworked wife, that marched in Chicago even though they where told the march was canceled.

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Working It Out

More than a year ago I was laid off. Which happens to be a rather common occurrence in the game development field. Like many people in that situation I went into a frantic “search for new job” mode. I was lucky to land a new job at Phosphor Games. Which proved to me how outstanding the Chicago game development industry is.

But, alas, I wasn’t as happy as I thought I could be and more importantly I wasn’t as productive as I have been in the past. I’m the kind of person that needs big challenges to drive me. So I went looking for a place I could pursue those challenges. And after a chance encounter with an old colleague at a bar, after a game development meeting, I decided to listen to his work proposition. And, quite unexpectedly, I found what I was looking for. Everything I heard and everything I though made me think “I like this challenge.”

I’ll be starting a new job in April helping out CodeBeast get their Chicago office off the ground. I’m excited to tackle this challenge. Saying that I’m certain everything will work out would be highly out of my character.. But I can say there will be many fun challenges to work out in my future.

I love my daughter for… #1-10

What now feels like ages ago, during a time of high stress, I started writing a diary. Not entirely a diary about myself.. But a diary about my observations of my then two year old daughter. It was therapy against the stress and trying times. If I could find something that made me happy each day and write it down it would “reset” my mind and help me move away from the stressful events. It eventually because something else. It became a way for me to capture and remember what I couldn’t from the hundreds of photographs I normally take of life around me.

Eventually that part of my stress went away. But another came, and thankfully also passed. Now that life looks as bright as it has ever been I’m taking up the diary again.

What follows will be a multipart recounting of the once only Facebook diary entries. They will both be re-edited to correct obvious language mistakes and will sometimes contain some more explanation (if I remember). After the retelling I will resume the diary as best as I can.

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Eventful

A short time ago, in the Twitter space, a local game developer complained about a game development scheduling conflict. Which prompted from a second game developer the wish for a comprehensive event calendar. For which my immediate thought was “that’s something some programming can solve”. And hence I started working up a quick Python script to merge a bunch of calendars into one. And like the best programmers I stole a bunch of code someone else had written and edited for my use!

I’ll hopefully be adding different kinds of local development calendars. But for now you can get the game development calendar here. It is currently composed of the following other calendars:

If you have a calendar you think would be good to add to the above list please contact me here on on Twitter. Note, the calendar must be publicly accessible and in iCalendar format.