Ah right OK, didn't realise this was a repeating cycle!

whoa what happened here?

i'm going with unity for now because of the abundance of tutorials/preexisting assets/ease of use

working my way through the space shooter tutorial. some parts are over the top, over explained for me, but I think I'll be able to make something simple but meaningful in less than a week with this thing. I'm trying not to be too ambitious though

My idea is a galaga/scrolling shooter style game that's sort of a mix between that and frogger, loosely based on the place that I work. I'm not trying to make like a smash hit but just something I could show my friends that they'd like or if I can tinker around with it for a while, maybe something to show an employer.

the worst problem I'm having right now is art, I have no idea how to make sprites and I am not artistic at all. It's gonna be a lot of MSpaint-ish **** at first I think.

Use a photoshop that at least has layering, such as GIMP. Take advantage of layers. Also spend like 5 hours on YouTube. If you can't afford that, then just outsource it and pay for the results using text sprites to fill in everything and figure-out the game-play so you don't slow down production. You can also inspect other people's sprites for free giving you an idea about what makes a good sprite.

You might just be better off hiring someone. If it were me, I'd make some text-sprites to fill-in and get the game mechanics down, and then tabulate how much it's going to cost for me to learn and do it myself, the long term benefits, and whether or not I want to be the jack of all trades, or start outsourcing some of the art. I think art that's "good enough" can be learned through time, but there are undoubtedly natural artists who are starving out there.

There are free resources like that also to use as placeholders, or just to use in general if that's as far as you're concerned with going.

Unity seems to have really good support for stuff like layering, yeah I think its a good idea to go really simple and crappy just to get the game going before I elaborate on art

Here's a simple web app for designing animated sprites:
http://www.piskelapp.com/

Making decent sprites is a pain though, and if you have no experience drawing or doing design work you should probably just use old sprites from nes or snes games. Or find free sprite resources.

I'm a little late in the game engine discussion but if you want to do web games then this might be a good fit:
https://phaser.io/

I've used TypeScript on personal projects and I like it a lot. It's a slight pain to integrate into your build cycle and stuff (although since I imagine most JS pros are already used to having compile their ****, whether it's with babel or webpack or whatever, so maybe that isn't a pain point) but at a super basic level, I think it saves time for my types to be concretely defined and have a compiler and IDE checking that I'm using them in the way I think I am. Type definitions also allow the IDE to know more concretely what a given object is, and thus bring up more relevant auto-complete suggestions when I type "obj." and want to look for a particular field/method/whatever.

That's interesting.

Yea I use babel/webpack.

It's amazing being able to write a deploy script "npm run start" that builds and then deploys to s3.

I also love how basically everything in every config is just a json object.

Finished the bootcamp today.

Going to do a long writeup on my blog about it, but it was a super positive experience.

@goofy you can get IDE auto-complete by documenting js:

http://usejsdoc.org/about-getting-started.html

i think it's faster for personal projects, since last i checked typescript requires typings for all the external lib you use

@larry i think you'll find a good full time position, but if you want a contract-to-hire lemme know, i think we got 3 a/A ppl here

Definitely post it here!

Also, HN might get a gas out of it. Just be sure your blog can handle the traffic. It's crazy if you get on the front page.

My site is on S3 and I did the steps for cloudfront but I'm pretty sure it isn't actually using it so I need to debug that.

I'm just serving static files so I don't think it should go down or cost much to keep up.

@Roger, I appreciate that.

My plan right now is to catch up on sleep and then spend next week grinding the **** out of code wars. I realize technical whiteboarding interviews are very less than ideal, but they seem easy enough to prepare for.

I can whip up crud apps no problem, but ask me to live code merge sort and it's gonna be exponentially less performant than it should be.

Thanks, I'll check that out, but fwiw external type definitions have improved drastically - the process is now like

npm install my-module
npm install @types/my-module

For popular libraries this has like a 80% success rate and when it does, everything just works.

You can learn every sorting and search algorithm in an afternoon if you wanted.

That...isn't true. But probably you can learn the ones likely to come up in a general interview in a couple. (And add data structures to the list.)

Practicing writing 10-line recursive functions to solve interview questions will pay off.

My favorite is heap sort because it's very easy to explain and fairly easy to produce on a white board (imo). Also, I have seen heap questions from time to time in interviews and it's nice to know how it works. It can be implemented with nothing more exotic than an array of whatevers.

Be sure:

$ curl -I your-site-url
...
Server: cloudflare-nginx
...

(that's a capital i, not lower-case L)

I meant the major ones, but i'm pretty sure you could. They arent overly complicated. Maybe if you dont understand the underlying data structures at all it could be difficult

Doesn't recursion lead to stack overflow and other resource management problems, and LISP is like the Latin of programming? Okay, maybe not Latin, but only AI people use LISP any more, I thought.

Here's some tips that have served me well in interviews.
1. Read the problem and think to yourself, how would I implement this with a tree.
2. If you read the problem and it seems like it will be awkward to implement with a loop, you should probably try to tackle it with recursion.
3. Be comfortable doing both of those things.

Maybe. For all of the basic ones, the algorithms and data structures are pretty intertwined; if you haven't seen b-trees or pairing heaps or whatever before I don't think a couple of hours is going to be enough to learn everything, but I guess it depends on what's on your list.

Tail recursion wouldn't, for example.

Generally speaking recursion in embedded programming is forbidden as is dynamic memory allocation pretty often. To answer your question yes regarding corrupting the processor stack. Sholar indicated tail recursion so yeah when you can use it. Recursive algorithm's don't come up very much in embedded work. In running user mode apps under an OS like Windows or Linux, have at it regarding recursive algorithms. Definitely a worthwhile thing to know and use.

Not sure about this. Wrote some LISP code many years ago to do symbolic differentiation which was fun.

I took OO in Scheme recently, and it was fun to learn about lists, etc. in the LISP sense. But, in the end, I'm using C++.

Sholar made a good point about tail recursion.