Dwindling Godlight's Blog

I've been studying Python now for around two months and I've earned several certificates in that time while also feeling, steadily, like I've gained ground on the skill and mastery of computer science I had aimed to achieve.

And yet I still feel as if I have hardly moved an inch.

I can write some code now, sure, I can understand more than I can write- fair. I can speak to concepts like NP and NP-completeness, Binary Trees, and Tries. I can tell you what they do, how they work, what methods might need to be in them in order to make them functional- but I might not be able to write them without some googling.

I have spoken to my mentors and my friends and they say this is normal, that I'm doing great and that my pace is impressive- but why don't I feel that way?

My friend said that it's probably because I have unrealistic expectations and standards for myself and I wonder if this pit of self-doubt will ever leave or if I'm doomed to stare into the abyss regardless of effort.

I want to make my game, the MUD, the thing I really care about- but I'm playing around in Ren'py now because it's easier and I can actually get stuff done.

I am struggling to see headway in the places that matter to me and I've been wrestling with some realities I'm not comfortable with such as the fact that I may not be as smart or as special as I thought I was due to the fact things are difficult and take time.

I know this is just my own bullshit speaking and not true but the shadow is heavy here and I can feel the weight of the insecurity like a boulder.

I know and knew this journey wasn't going to be easy and it would be full of self-doubt, fear, and frustration. I'll pull myself out, I have before, but the truth is plain as it can be.

I am not where I want to be and I'm impatient to get there.

In the words of my dear friend, 'Patience? I fuckin' hate that guy.'

If there's one thing I've learned about coding in the short time I've been doing it, it's that Math is necessary and I suck at it. I'm in the process of re-teaching myself from the ground up but that is a slow and arduous task that is taking much effort to remain consistent on. I'm honestly even considering... *shudders* workbooks. Regardless of my lack of Math skills I have managed to complete Boot.dev's coursework on Algos in Python and I learned a lot. Namely about the different kinds of sorting that one can use in order to organize data. It was dense stuff, but it made sense in the end and with the help of Anki I've been able to keep up with flashcards to stay on-top of my conceptual knowledge. It's absolutely wacky what I think I know by heart and then don't. I've not really done any project coding lately, I've been mostly focused on life- lots of changes. I'm a bit scared right now thanks to some huge upheavals in my personal scope but I have faith that it's for the right reasons and that I should keep my eyes on the prize. I want to become a programmer or engineer and that's going to take a lot of effort without any formal education to back it up.

So it turns out math is cool.

Big O notation is what I learned today in my coding assignments and I wanted to share it with you since teaching helps it stick.

Effectively what we are accomplishing with this notation is a description of the amount of resource consumption that a program will consume over time. Ideally we end up with O(1) but that won't be the case for everything so we need a way to describe growing demands in resources across time or iteration.

The notation goes as follows for what I understand in Python:

Constant O(1)

Logarithmic O(log n)

Linear O(n)

Squared O(n^2)

Exponential O(2^n)

Factorial O(n!)

What each of these notations is describing is the amount of operations a process will increase by, worst case, if scaled with 'n' inputs.

What's an example?

for i in range(6):

counter += 1

If we were to imagine that range allows any input of an integer we could see how this function only iterates once per input value giving it a LINEAR growth.

If we look at a number line this makes sense.

0-1-2-3-4-5-6

Our process starts at 0 and iterates once to get to 1 etc. until it eventually reaches 6. This is O(n).

If we added another layered loop:

for i in range (6): <- Loops what's below it 6 times.

for d in range(6): <- Loops what's below it 6 times.

counter += 1

We have now increased the processing demand QUADRATICALLY. Why? Because if we assume 6 to be the variable integer that we could influence we can see that by doing it twice we have to count to 6 uh.... 6 times.

0-6-12-18-24-30-36 <-

That's O(n^2). Now we have dramatically increased the amount of processes something requires with a SINGLE line of code.

Why is this important?

Well computers run things so fast that this 'lag' you could call it might build up over time. Memory leaks, mandatory resets, etc. are some results of this. The frequency at which this maintenance needs to be performed to keep the code functioning is directly connected to the 'Big O' notation used to determine how elegant the solution is.

Turns out different algorithms have varying Big O values which is how one might determine the best option for their given task.

It's also just a neat way to look at data but I'll wax poetic in logarithms once I have a more full understanding of them.

I've been taking a small break from my coding journey to tend to some worldly needs and now I'm starting to feel the itch again. I have a terrible relationship with burnout so I fear it like the plague and I also have ADHD so I fear, even more so, the idea that I might have to do battle with my own psyche just to focus on the tasks in front of me.

All of that combined means that I have difficulty figuring out when to start and stop things in order to maintain a healthy relationship and balance with them and education is no different.

I'm doing good though, I think, and I'm always down to learn new techniques for avoiding burnout and such if anyone would like to share.

ONTO THE POINT OF THE POST!

Building a Fucking Map in Evennia:

First off, let me start by saying fuck me for ever thinking it was 'easy enough' to add a feature to a video game. I should have tomatoes thrown at me for that and so should any non-programmer who ever says these words.

I'm trying to do something I would consider fairly simple. I want a map in my text based MUD. The easiest way I can think to do this is to draw an ASCII map of the game world using some fun tricks so let me outline my logic below:

Assign coordinates to every room.

Reference those coordinates through the entities within the room. (Players, Monsters, etc.)

Store the absolute map in data somewhere for reference.

Build a map renderer that takes the player's current position, compares it to the grid, and then draws the map against the reference.

Profit

This sounds so easy (it doesn't) but it's way harder than it looks.

Let's start with step 3 since that's what I'm on.

Howdafuq? Before I even get to the herculean task that is building a renderer and figuring that madness out- how does one store this data? One of my coding buddies told me that I should probably store it in the SQLite database that comes with Evennia but I don't really know DBs enough to fuck with that yet so I'm like... maybe an object? A persistent object?

A script?

Something needs to hold info. My current idea is a script or an object that is persistent and lives somewhere on the server to act as a sort of digital cartographer. In addition each player will likely have a set of discrete coordinates on themselves that serves to tell the renderer 'hey I've SEEN that fog of war room' so they don't have to visit it to see it on the map again.

The problem is, because I am baby programmer, I have absolutely no idea how to build this and looking it up has been... only somewhat helpful. This is where using some of those AI tools to help scaffold the code would be useful but this is where my personal mantra intersects which is: "I don't want it to code for me, I want it to offload work." Right now, I don't know how to code this portion of the game well enough for me to feel comfortable handing off some of that work and just double checking it.

So I'm stuck at the moment waiting for an idea or to finish up my coursework on SQL so I can actually learn enough to make this work. I've been taking the Boot.dev course on Algos because the AI chatbot project was making me mad and I figured I'd rather do something that felt productive instead of bash my head against an unmoving wall.

A MUD can stand for a lot of things, but the thing it means to me is multi-user dungeon. When networks were contained primarily an academic arenas, the invention of virtual worlds was not only novel, but exciting- something that no one had seen before. Up to that point. Especially one in which you could interact so organically with other players.

As a young individual I played a lot of Achaea, Dreams of Divine Realms and was enamored by the quality of these games.

They offered immersive role-playing unlike anything I had ever experienced up to that point and beyond that, the game mechanics were not simply mechanics but tied directly into the narrative overarching story of the entire game world.

It became increasingly obvious that this was an addiction as I spent the better part of 2 years playing.

It influenced every single aspect of what I value at a video games and storytelling and even to this day I have always dreamed of making my own MUD. I have even reached out a few times in the past to iron Realms Entertainment with hopes of possibly joining their team, when I was woefully underexperienced.

Even today, as good of a builder as I am, I am not that great of a coder and I don't know that I would be a good fit.

I am using the Evennia library in Python in order to attempt to make my own MUD after falling in love with the WrittenRealms engine that I highly recommend anyone interested in MUDs go check out.

It is an incredible engine for rapid prototyping and honestly making full games if you are okay with them occasionally breaking because of changes or not having full control over the logic of the game.

I personally believe that these trade-offs are very worth it in some cases, but for what I wanted to accomplish it simply was not accessible enough so I decided to do the much """"easier""""/s thing and learn to code.

A month into this journey and I don't think I can go back on shear principle of the sunk cost fallacy but honestly I wouldn't want to anyway. I am pursuing a career at this point, not just a hobby.

But that does beg the question... Have I gotten any progress done on it?

I had a completely functional and working prototype back in WrittenRealms that we were actively playtesting, it's been a month now and we haven't even touched the game. The most I've managed to do is put a coordinate system on rooms and even that is not useful for anything yet because it doesn't do anything- all it does is store coordinates on the room.

I can write loops, I can create small menus, I can do all sorts of stuff in native python but the minute I touch this library I start to struggle. I am no professional, I am very much a novice, so I am certain that many of the roadblocks that I am facing are simply due to my inexperience.

It has been a hair discouraging not to get anything done on the primary project that I started this journey for. I'm starting to realize that it is damaging my motivation a little bit because I really hoped that within a month I would be able to see some headway thanks to my training, but I'm starting to realize that perhaps the biggest issue is that I haven't really been putting my hands in it because I've been hoping that some sort of magic switch would come on and I would have the skill suddenly to do it.

That does not seem to be the case and the more that I study the more I realize it will never be the case because coding is something that you learn by doing not something that you learn by reading. You can understand the theory all day, but the practice is practice.

Ultimately, it is the separation of myself from the willingness to fail that is the problem. Some of my own stubbornness is absolutely at fault as well, I could 100% just copy and paste code from one of the chat bots online until eventually I get something functional but then I wouldn't understand how it works and all of the fun that came from WrittenRealms by logicing out how to solve everything would be gone. A machine would be doing it for me.

I don't mind assistance, but I don't want it to do the work. So now we stand at the crossroads, what happens next? Do I give up? Do I abandon my dream because I haven't made progress in what I consider a reasonable amount of time?

Fuck no! This is only the beginning of a massive journey. I just didn't realize how tall the mountain was until I started. But every time I learned something new, every little tiny mini terminal-based game that I make, every single time that I struggle against a functional programming concept or have to write a recursive loop. I am learning something that will help me achieve my dream.

I have acquired new dreams during this process that I didn't even have when I started.

I think that this is overall been one of the healthiest things for me, but I do want to see some progress on the goals that I set out with initially so I believe I will be getting to my project this weekend at least for an hour or so.

In addition to that, I'm learning basic math again, from the ground up. I wasn't taught very well in school and it fucking sucked. Now I'm having to rebuild my relationship with what is easily the most interesting subject in the world.

It's tricky, I feel very childish for having to scrape so hard against things that I once knew very easily, but I was never very good at some of these things and now that I'm trying to learn to code, I feel like it's more important than ever to master math.

If this interests anyone, I would be happy to tell you what my MUD is about and point you to some resources where you can learn more. Otherwise I will continue to work on it passively and report back about my goals.

I recently finished the functional programming chapter of Boot.dev and I'm looking forward to continuing. However, I have been stumped on this AI chat bot for like 4 days.

We'll start with the basics. This blog exists explicitly for me to chronicle my adult learning journey and share my opinions on various things. I do not aim for this to be particularly themed and instead a more public facing version of a 'journal' for the sake of community interaction should anyone deem it interesting enough to engage with.

Starting at the top. My experience with education was largely bad and I didn't really retain a whole lot from my time with it besides an interest in learning. Now I'm much later in life and I want to fix what was never truly established. I want to get good at some stuff, but it's going to take a while, and I'm going to be bad at it for a long time before I'm good at it.

I've learned, however, that nothing comes from hiding from your flaws and since I struggle to identify the gaps in my own knowledge I figure writing it down might help.