Now

Starting a project of my own

I left Trustpilot to take at least a year off and focus on a project of my own. I'm trying to build a CAD app that makes it much easier to deal with really complex projects, and handle a project from the initial idea all the way to production.

I've spent some time exploring technical solutions (and hitting a lot of dead ends), and am now trying to document in detail how the app is supposed to work. The step after that will be to try to implement prototypes of the technically harder parts of the project.

Back in Portugal

To focus on the project and save some money, I moved back to my hometown, Leiria. After almost 15 years living in cities, I looked forward to being back in the countryside. Now I look forward to being back in the countryside without rainy weather all the time.

Learning

I started a Linear Algebra course on brilliant.org, but haven't progressed much lately.
After figuring out that WebGL won't cut it for my project, I've been learning Vulkan and Rust's gtx graphics library, along with other libraries needed to make a native graphics app. Still have a long way to go learning Rust itself.

Videogames

I played through the main story of Red Dead Redemption 2. It is simply the best story I've ever seen in a videogame, and actually one of the best stories I've seen overall. Really made me care and identify with those characters. It also has amazing graphics, and actually inspired me to dig deeper into ray marching and volumetric rendering techniques.

I'm also half way through Starwars: Jedi Fallen Order, and started subjecting some poor little green fellas to my rocketry experiments in Kerbal Space Program.

Podcasts

Made two new additions to my podcasts list that I've been enjoying.
The first is On the metal, with Bryan Cantrill and Jess Frazelle, a podcast dedicated to the threshold between hardware and software. This episode with Jonathan Blow is particularly awesome.
The other one is Starting Greatness a podcast with stories and advice from entrepeneurs, focused on the early days of their companies. It's a bit biased towards VC backed companies, but I enjoy hearing stories of people when they had no clue what they were doing, and if there was any point in it. A feeling I'm familiar with these days.