One year

I started this journal one year ago with a netbook and enough anger at my prior failures to learn C to motivate me to push through the hard parts.

The best way to summarize my progress over the past year is this: I'm more overwhelmed by the things I can do now than the things I have yet to learn. That's a clumsy way of saying that the past year's progress has unlocked the capacity to pick any arbitrary next step and go along with it. The next step I've gone the farthest with is GTK and I'm learning now that Python and C are not mutually exclusive and I'm really itching to learn how to write Python modules.

My goal as stated in the journal header was to gain competency in C before I'm 30. I've learned now that this isn't exactly a coherent statement. Learning C is not learning how to program any more than learning the alphabet is learning how to write.

There are still several big topics that elude me, but they only remain that way because I have yet to sit down and hash through them. These topics are less about C specifically and more about data structures and programming methodologies common to most languages.

In the immediate future I'd like to get through a few more Project Euler problems and get through a few more (extremely dry) chapters of the GTK book. I'm learning about Python on the side but what's keeping me interested in that Python itself is written in C and it's well supported to write custom modules in C.

On the long term list I'd like to get a better handle on OOP and pick a (non-interpreted) language to explore that with such as C++ or Objective-C. Getting a familiarity with network programming (sending/receiving packets), a graphics library (SDL or OpenGL) and databases would be fantastic, too.

That's pretty much my one year report.

Last night I started rewriting my file reader to have all the important functions kept in a static library that I can load into Python with the CTypes module. Eventually I want to write an actual Python module to import data from the files and see if I get better results.

I'll do another general progress report in April when I turn 30.