Oh, hello! Didn’t expect to see me so early in the new year, did you? It’s only been about five weeks since my last post, so I know, this is weird. ;)

I passed PHP II. Not only that, I kind of did pretty well. I nailed a bunch of stuff on my final project and am still feeling pretty good about that. I saw The Last Jedi with my brother and his friend A on December 15th. Afterwards, we stopped in at our parents’ house, where my brother would have dinner with them and his wife and the two kids, while I… had to go home and code until my fingers bled. So I bounced my youngest nephew on my knee for a bit, squeezed the eldest in a hug, then headed back home.

It all started to just click for me. I would have passed, if I’d handed things in as they were. But it would have been something like a 65% or something and that would have stuck in my craw. So I was thrilled when things just started to click and I was able to build out a lot of the required functionality that, to that point, hadn’t been working right for me. At the risk of sounding cliché, the force was strong with me that night and I finished the class with an 87%.

So that was a relief, but I also felt like I learned a lot of lasting knowledge in PHP II — and not just PHP stuff, either. We’re talking stuff like gitbash, git, Docker, containers, APIs, JSON, all kinds of stuff. It’s pretty cool and I’m so glad I learned that along with the PHP stuff I learned.

And now, JavaScript & AJAX has begun.

Once I’m done with this, by the end of March, I’ll have my Diploma in Web Programming. That represents 260 hours of class alone. I don’t even want to think about how many hours I’ve slaved over this material outside of class, but it was easily as much time in class for each — if not more, especially in the case of Java. So we’re looking at about 520 hours, if not more, working through HTML/CSS, SQL, Java, PHP and now JavaScript and AJAX.

I can’t wait to be done and reclaim any portion of my free time again. ;)

And speaking of free time, I have a crazy idea.

I spent a lot of time playing on the computer as a kid. A lot. Not a lot playing triple-A games or first-person shooters or whatever (although there were a ton of games from Sierra and such, of course). No, what I spent probably way too much time doing as a kid was calling in to local Bulletin Board Systems and writing on message boards and playing online games. I spent what must be years of my life playing Trade Wars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, which were two of the most popular BBS door games that existed.

Another one I loved was written by a friend of mine. It was called Sky Mountain. The goal was to climb to the peak of the mountain, at 241,000 feet, but you had to mind the Sky Lord and the other climbers on the mountain. The way you climbed the mountain was by answering trivia questions. (Or was that how you gained health? Magic? Whatever, trivia questions were vital.)

So I’m going to take my neophyte PHP skillz and create a web-based game. Details are very fuzzy right now, but I’m planning on a game that harkens back to Sky Mountain in that it has a lot of trivia in it, which will, naturally, be vital to game progression. I’m hoping to have over 4000 questions to start with, in a ton of categories, and I also hope to have a reasonable mechanism to prevent duplicate questions (outside of just having a metric assload of questions to draw from). We’ll see how that goes, since, you know, I’m going to write all these questions myself. While I’m sure that there are open-source trivia databases out there, if this is my game, it’s going to be my game, at least for the content. Some of the questions will be easy to come up with — periodic table stuff, for example, or capital cities. Stuff about geography, music, religion? All a little more difficult.

So that’s my plan for basically the rest of the year. My goal is to have a working beta by late September. Of course, I can’t dedicate much time to it right now because of class, and I do have a full-time job (which I love) and I do have at least a couple of trips happening this year, plus there’s National Novel Writing Month in November… It’s going to be challenging for sure, but I’m really looking forward to taking all the stuff I’ve learned (and will be shortly learning) and incorporating it into a real, actual project.

I’ll be sure to check in again before JavaScript/AJAX ends!