R1D0: Hello there! But why?

Seriously, why?

Why would I start a blog now? And more importantly, why should *you* care and read it? Alright, let’s take things from the start!

In the beginning was… a coder!

A few days ago I decided to take the #100DaysOfCode Challenge. The summer break is near and I will – finally – get some extra time to do all the things I’ve always wanted but couldn’t because of all the time the university was taking away. Work on awesome projects, learn new things, world domination! 😈

Err, okay, maybe not that last one 🤔
Anyhoo… 🙄

So as I was saying, now I will finally get some extra time! Why not spend it constructively? And by constructively, I obviously don’t mean leveling up 9 alts on World of Warcraft up to level 60  70  80  85  90  100 110 😂

Okay, truth be told, I would code every day either way, either it was for the challenge or not. This is simply who I am. I started coding for the first time back on the elementary school when I was eight years old. I started with creating small “programs” in Microsoft Access using Visual Basic for Applications, then took some baby steps (okay, maybe not “baby” steps, I was around 10 at the time, I knew how to walk 🙄) in web development with PHP and HTML/CSS and since then I’ve been learning anything that seemed interesting to me. I’ve worked with languages like C++, C#, NodeJS, Go, Python, the list goes on… I just love what I do and I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world.

Why #100DaysOfCode?

Okay, okay, so why the #100DaysOfCode Challenge? Why would I take it if I know to code already? Aren’t people mostly taking the challenge to get motivated and learn how to code?

While I don’t plan to spend the next 100 days on learning how to code – I’ve already spent quite a lot more on that task – I’m still planning to learn new things. For example, while I do know the basics, I still want to dive deeper into Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. (got it? “deeper”? “deep” learning? 😛 no? okay .-. )

But that’s not the whole story. The magic word here is “motivation“. We always need motivation. If we are not motivated enough to do something we simply won’t or we will most likely give up sooner or later.

So if I won’t be learning new stuff 100 out of the 100 days of the challenge, then what?

Simple, I’ll be building stuff!

I actually got this idea many months ago but then classes started and my free time started to look pretty much like this:

An exponential decay graph representing the amount of free time I have after classes started

Yuuup. FML.

But now comes the blessing of the summer break, with its glorious supply of free time!

And that’s where we are now:

Awesome! Now what?

Well, maybe I can finally bring IndieGuilds to life!

Wait, IndieWho?

IndieGuilds! Let me explain.

One of the things I’ve been doing all these years I’ve spent coding is game development. I just love it! But being purely a programmer, a coder, is a downside when working on a project on your own. Because in games, even if the code is perfect and the idea great, having graphics that totally look like 💩 isn’t going to help much.

So let’s talk about indie game developers! It’s just wonderful how a bunch of people can get together and build all these amazing games! Artists, designers, programmers, people from every field! And all that without a huge company to back it all up.

But here’s a catch: in most small indie game development teams, people come and go. And if too many people go, that could mean the end of the journey for a maybe promising project. And that’s just sad…

Enter IndieGuilds.

IndieGuilds aims to be a place for game developers to hang out, a place where like-minded people can meet, create teams and do what they love the most, make games and share them with the rest of the world!

What’s with the blog?

Oh, right!

Even though it’s been two years since I created my Twitter account, it hasn’t been a long time since I started actively using it. Once I started the challenge I wanted to talk in a little bit more detail about why I chose to do so. About what I was planning to do during the 100 days of the challenge and why it matters. But very soon I realized that the 140 characters limit is so, well, limiting. And that’s sad.

One reason why people use social media, except from connecting with other people, is sharing their thoughts. And while this should be a fun and constructive process, I found myself struggling to summarize my thoughts into just 140 words and actually spending more time for that than it’d take to write the tweet itself.

Starting a blog isn’t really a new thought for me.

Back in High School, I was really into writing stories. I could spend countless hours thinking and writing. So I thought could maybe combine the two things I enjoyed doing at the time, programming and writing, into one: blogging about programming!

The time passed and long story short, I didn’t start a blog.

Until now!

When I realized that the tweet character count was choking my creativity and since I was planning to share details on how the challenge and the development are going, I thought that starting a blog might actually be the best solution.

And that’s how we ended up here, with me writing and you reading this brand new blog!

Cool, now what?

Without the 140 characters limit, I’ll be able to write whatever I want, with as much detail as needed. I can talk about my progress on the challenge, about how the development of IndieGuilds or any other project I’m working on is going, heck, I could even start writing stuff related to programming directly such as tutorials etc! The possibilities are countless! All that’s left is to see how it goes.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I’ll stop tweeting my progress on the challenge or anything else! After all, Twitter is at the heart of the #100DaysOfCode Challenge! But whenever I write new articles, I will be linking them on tweets so you can find out more information about the #100DaysOfCode Challenge, IndieGuilds or anything else I might write about!

Stay tuned!