Hey All,
I have a few updates for everyone! This is a little more of a personal update than anything, but if you want to know what’s going on with this darn blog feel free to read more.
The Updates
First, I haven’t done this before – I removed my Serval WS Review post.
The reason for this is a few unsatisfied customers have complained on my blog post about their System76 products. In all honesty, I’m still using my Serval, and it seems to work fine for me (barring the few complaints I had about keyboard build quality). I always felt a little weird posting the review, but I just feel especially slimy leaving a good review up when people are going out of their way to complain about the System76 products. I feel like maybe I just got lucky, and perhaps the regular build quality is much worse – so, let’s just remove the post.
Second, despite what my commit history says, RefN is not dead.
I’ve been worried, I started talking to people about RefN, and then a month ago I upgraded to Ubuntu 16.04, which caused some trouble. The issue with this upgrade is that the packaging for LLVM to support CMake find-scripts from the default Ubuntu repositories is broken. The bug has been noted, but I think it might be low-priority because a possible workaround exists, not to mention it’s a very specific scenario. I don’t see the point in raising a fuss about it; it’s an experimental reflection system, and I have other ideas I’d like to explore as well. Like I mentioned, a workaround exists, but I’d rather just wait for the packaging to be fixed so I can update documentation to the new build steps.
Third, what I’m working on in the meantime is OpenSK, a cross-platform stream toolkit.
The best way to describe OpenSK is a superset of PortAudio – I hope it will be a convenient way to interface with device information streams (audio, video, midi, etc.) It has a lot of the same abstractions, but I purposefully took a few different steps that I think will make the API a little more explicit. Much like RefN, it’s still heavily in the experimentation phase, but I’m happy to be working on it and hope that it’ll live through all these iterations.
And finally, the status of this blog – I’m not really sure what to do with it.
Some people want me to do Vulkan tutorials, I’ve gotten a request to talk about writing efficient code (or testing the efficiency of code), some people want me to do more with Qt. I really gotta say, I’m just not feeling it. Even when I write about my own tools and pipelines I’m creating, I spend half the time thinking “wow, I could be writing more tools and pipelines right now”. I guess I’ll just say that I hope some of the tutorials helped some of you, and that should inspiration strike I’ll hopefully write more content. Creating posts was easy when I was in school because I had a lot of time, but now my time is pretty much entirely consumed.
To Summarize
Removed the Serval WS review, RefN is on the back-burner, OpenSK is under development, blog is on hiatus.
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what’s going on with me professionally, check out my GitHub; As I work on projects, you’ll see them go up there.
I’m sure I’ll have more stuff to post some day.
Cheers,
– Trent Reed