I’m back from Europe, then took a short jaunt up the road to Dallas with the family before changing gears.
I spent a few weeks cranking out pull requests for cuberite, a lightweight Minecraft server written in C++ (and so avoiding the myriad problems of Java). Being essentially a fan project run by a small core group, without any support from Mojang itself, the server is perpetually behind the curve of the latest features Microsoft has released. Being a clean-room design, a lot of the weird intricacies don’t carry over from “vanilla” Minecraft - many subtle bugs that were exploited to build machines in the original don’t work here.
But, minigames (games built within Minecraft) don’t care about this sort of thing, generally. They care about things like armor and swords and hitpoints. These are often played on multi-thousand player commercial servers, where performance is the chief concern. Cuberite fits this niche exactly, in my mind.
So I’ve started a project to build a decent minigame in cuberite. Along the way I’ve been submitting PRs on GitHub (and you can, too).
If you’re into programming, it’s good to contribute to open-source projects. It helps you hone your skills, and you have fun along the way. I do it for the latter, mostly. For the former, it helps you hone the skills you don’t learn from a classroom, that are crucial for any real work. The ability to dive into a pre-existing codebase, and build a feature, I’ve found is not often taught (nor, really, can it be, not directly).
If you’re not into programming, submitting PRs just means I’m contributing my time and code to the common cause for fun. Yes, I enjoy my work.
In the midst of all of this coding, I’ve also been packing up to move out. I’ve lived with my parents my entire life (well, my Mother), now I have an apartment closer to where I’ll work (I start work in September). This entails much furniture shopping, etc., which is why this July post was posted on the 31st at 11P.M.
Busy, busy, busy. Just the way I like it.
