I know, I know, there's still almost 3 weeks until the end of the year, but I also made a decision earlier that I'm going to write updates whenever I feel like it, and I've been browsing this year's statuses until I reached the summary of 2024, where I listed the following plans:
- start using GRASP to develop itself
- make it usable to people other than myself
- publish it in F-Droid and/or Google Play Store
- make a game for the Lisp Game Jam
- write (and publish) an interactive e-book (as a GRASP app) and earn $$$
- implement the features mentioned at Causal Islands (a comic version of the A* search algorithm and a module browser)
- possibly also integrate GRASP with git
NONE of those happened, and even worse, I was unemployed for 4 months.
Not that I wasn't doing anything. Conversely, I was almost constantly pushing myself to do something, to the point of a mania, but all those pushes sucked all the joy from the development, which is probably why I failed.
I think my condition somewhat related to that of people who claim that they experience burnout - I felt that even doing relatively simple things required considerable time and effort.
Despite all this, there is a number of things that I managed to do:
- I made a 2d physics engine for GRASP
- I wrote a self-hosting Scheme-to-Javascript translator (with macro expander)
- I managed to employ my toolchain to publish an app in the Android store (although I failed to actually publish the app)
There were also a few endeavours that were less successful:
- I started writing an interactive book, and then stopped
- I started repurposing my Quora answer as an interactive book, but also ran into obstacles that stopped me.
I had some positive experience yesterday, though. I decided that I will write a new micro-iteration of GRASP, this time in JavaScript and for the browser. My further plan is to rewrite it to a Scheme flavor, enhancing my Scheme-to-JS translator along the way. But for the first time in a very long time, I had the sense that I was really getting somewhere.
