I know, I know. I haven’t done anything is 3 weeks, shame on me.

But I had reasons for that.

First one is, that I had pre-exams at school, so I had to take care of that. Basically a nearly 6 hour test in German, 4 and a half in Math and 5 hours in English.

Second one is, that I worked on my first bigger Rust project. I already mentioned it briefly in the last blog post, my clicker game called Cluster.

Developing it was a lot of fun and I learned a lot on the way, got to know Rust. So it basically fulfilled it’s job perfectly. You can find the git repo here. I have everything explained there in the README.

One funny anecdote I want to tell you is this one:

I wanted to add so and so much points per second, depending on the items the player bought, and I “solved” this, by putting the whole thread to sleep for one second. As you probably can already imagine, this raised some problems. The biggest one, I could only read the input of the player once per second, which sucks super hard. And I had no idea on how to fix that. I already was thinking about multi-threading and such, totally over complicating stuff.

But LevitatingBuisnessMan to the rescue. He is a guy, I do not even remember how I got to know him, to whom I talk maybe once or twice a year. We talk about the coding projects we are currently working on and share a bit of knowledge and other stuff.

So I show him, what I am working on and he mentioned, that I should not put the whole thread to sleep, but could just use Systemtime.now().elapsed to measure the time since the last execute of the add function. So I implemented that and the problem was solved. Without him I probably would have never found this function and over engineered the whole thing unnecessarily. He also made a PR to the project to implement a better save system, which was on my list anyway, so that was super nice.

What is the point, I do not know. Maybe just that one should not be afraid to talk with people about their projects, even if they are tiny and you are just a beginner and the other guy is programming in this language for 10 years. Everybody was a beginner once and the majority of people is nice and willing to help, show you stuff, which is super useful, that you would have maybe never found.

It was super fun building this small project and super useful as a learning project. Seeing this whole thing build up from nothing was a very rewarding feeling and brought me back the joy at coding. So yeah, it is totally worth to build you own (small) (side-)projects.