A new decade with new goals

It’s finally here: 2020! The start of a new decade means it’s time for me to make some new goals for this year! While I don’t necessarily set new year’s resolutions, I do set some goals since they seem to lead me to completely new experiences, even if I don’t quite hit the mark. You can read more about my 2019 goals and how they turned out for an example of this.

Without further ado, here’s some of the goals I am setting for 2020…

A completed Unscripted experience… mostly

In July of 2019, I started Unscripted in hopes of creating a small indie game that covers the trials and tribulations of publishing an app/game to a prestigious software distribution center like the Mac App Store. I released a demo of this game in December on Itch.io and have been working to continue development on this. I’m hoping that I can get the game finished at some point in 2020, or to at least get it to a working state. I also hope to accomplish more things with Unscripted such as modernizing the website with Nikola and trying to update as much stuff in it as I can to Python 3 (maybe even some modding support 😉).

I say that I want to get it in a more-or-less complete state because I know the struggles and difficulties in writing. After all, Unscripted is a a visual _novel_…

Continuing the Gopherdon trend

Gopherdon’s been a great project thus far for Goucher, and I really want to continue building on that work of bringing the fediverse to Goucher and vice-versa. I’ll be launching a public beta of Gopherdon once I’m back on campus, and that will definitely be exciting. I can’t wait to take Gopherdon to new heights and see this Gopherdon project keep going. I can already tell that a lot of people that I talk to are interested in this as well…

I also hope that Gopherdon will inspire others to look into decentralized social networking and things of the like, given that most (if not all) of the Gopherdon work has been open-source.

Building a Hyperspace community

I started Hyperspace in late January of 2019 alongside Gopherdon to complement each other. Since then, Hyperspace has become a popular project in the fediverse (and one of the most popular projects I’ve maintained on GitHub) with a community starting to form around it and now a small team to manage it. I hope that Hyperspace continues to grow and gain new features over the next few months. This year, I hope that Hyperspace also returns to the Mac App Store with brand-new Swift code that can be ported to iOS and iPadOS with ease.

That being said, I also hope that the Hyperspace team continues to grow closer together with new members as we work to make Hyperspace the greatest client for the fediverse yet. Nodar and I have been excited to start the SwiftUI version of Hyperspace for macOS/iOS/iPadOS for a while and can’t wait to start when we get back from the break. I’m positive that our other members like Travis and Audrey are excited to keep making the existing desktop product amazing with new features like bookmarking.

More fun with Python

Marius Masalar

Python’s such a weird language, but I like using it. This year, I learned a lot more about Python’s odd quirks like Python decorators, list comprehensions, and the ability to copy methods from one class to another. I’ve also started to use Poetry, a dependency manager, for my projects and have been tinkering with it more. This year, I want to continue learning more Pythonic things and any more quirks it has that could possibly drive me insane. Who knows? Maybe I’ll learn more about Python packages and how to upload one to PyPI (thought Poetry makes it pretty easy). Given that I always end up using Python for some things anyway, I don’t see how/why I wouldn’t really meet this goal, especially since Unscripted is essentially both a Python 2 (Ren'Py) and Python 3 (site, distribution) project!

There isn’t much that I’m expecting out of this year other than continuing what I’ve already been doing, but this should be very interesting to see how 2020 plays out.