5:55 PM

The past few days I have been working on a math app. I'm so tired from it. This is probably an idea I've had for years now, but never implemented until now. This app is awesome.

I really enjoy doing mental math problems, and there is a limitation with all of the existing math apps out there. However, this new game or app allows those features.

11:46 PM

For example, I have all the multiplication from 1x1 to 20x20 memorized. But where can I find any that will do 20x20 to 30x30? From what I’ve searched, it doesn’t exist. This one has it, all the way up to 99x99.

There’s still some kinks to be worked out, but it has it, and much more.

I remember developing my first app in 2013, back then Swift wasn’t around yet so you had to use Objective-C to deploy on iOS. I don’t know how the early developers did it. Were they just some genius gods?

There were scarce tutorials back then. Nowadays you have tutorials of all kinds to do anything. There is a tutorial out there, especially on Udemy, on how to make pretty much any app.

Back when Apple first released the iPhone, and then they released the App Store. How did the developers ever make the first apps on it without any guides? It’s actually the same for video game consoles, like when the N64 first came out, or the NES (aka the famicom which came out 3 years earlier in Japan), developers somehow made games for it.

I’m very befuddled. These people are geniuses. Geniuses. Or maybe I am just an idiot and very stupid. I find programming quite difficult. I mean I’m good at my area of programming which is web development, I can make any kind of website I want to, I mean with AI my skillset has become largely irrelevant but I had this skill and ability at one point to a high level prior to AI. But websites have all sorts of rules and limitations, making them easy to work with.

Games like Super Mario Bros only had like 32kb of code and it was programmed in assembly, where there are zero rules. How did they figure it out? How did they figure out moving X bit to Y register would produce a pixel or so-and-so? It’s tough.

So I’m honestly intrigued and startled by the ingenious ability of some people. None of the college courses or school tests I’ve taken could ever compete with the level of creative intelligence and logical intelligence one would need to program decent software, because it is a creative field, you do it from scratch and imagination, and solve crazy problems.

Anyway, AI does it better than any human can nowadays, so this field has been equalized. But at one point this field was only available to the geniuses. I was never part of that group, even if I have made some apps and games in the past at some point, it’s not a skill I retained, nor was it one I was ever that good at.

Making a game is a really hard puzzle. Like you have to make it all from scratch. The entire idea from scratch. You have to map out how every single element functions and interacts. I’ve done it before but it is such a creative field, and then you need logic too, a lot of logic, there’s also math involved if you want to involve any physics like a ball bouncing, and you have to incorporate that equation from scratch. I mean I do describe it harder than what it is, it’s just writing some “bounce” code where a ball will go some other angle at a reduced velocity if they hit a surface at X angle, but it’s still so hard even if you already to know what to do, you have to type it all and test it. If you don’t know what to do you may have to brainstorm for hours.

Maybe I am an idiot, but it is not easy for me to figure things out. Since you have a lot of creative freedom in programming, the way you implement a solution may not even be the right one. Well, there’s not any “right” way as long as it works, but some ways are faster than others. The hardest puzzles to solve were always the efficiency ones. I’ve solved some of them in my time, invisible work, no one will see it. People just expect a website or program to be fast, they don’t understand there are a thousand ways to do it slowly and a very complex mind bending way to do it fast. The faster solution is harder to implement. It might even be very obvious to do, but writing the code to do it might be hard.

Only programmers can really respect the skills of another programmer if they saw how advanced their skill was. It’s like being able to draw stick figures (me) respecting someone who can draw a painting with a more complex character. To me it’s hard. I can even visualize an image in my mind, but putting it on paper is harder. At one point when I used to practice art I would just draw things I was looking at, and I became normal skilled at it. It’s just about observing things and their perspective. I don’t think I can do it anymore. The hard objects were round, that’s still hard for me. Only another artist can truly appreciate how difficult it is to draw a human statue like The Thinker, I can’t do that. It’s weird how such a skill set is worth basically nothing commercially when it is so difficult.

So yeah in these situations I sometimes view myself as a simpleton. But yeah I am working on this new app, and I will write about it more once it’s released. I worked on it for over 9 hours today. This was the same back in 2013/2014. I’d put in these kinds of hours, except back then I didn’t have AI. Tutorials were scarce too. I had to manually figure things out, everything out. That’s actually the way life should be. I don’t really like AI simplifying everything so much. But at least this dream app of mine will finally be released, years in the making.