All beginnings are small!

So, beginning on my new blog, I thought it would be fun to go back in time to catch up!

About a year and a half ago I started working my first (and current) industry job, and I had to relocate to Germany, which left me without Internet for way too long, but it did have the really awesome side-effect of giving me tons of spare-time in my free time (sad isn't it?) and so I had a lot of time to learn new skills!

As part of my job, I have to work with Flash and ActionScript from time to time, and while I sold myself as having a fairly good grasp on both, the truth is that I didn't know much of either when I started, and so I had to learn it, and learn it fast. At work I working hard to prove that I could easily help maintain their UI production, you know, since I "knew how to code pretty well" - however having done only a tad bit of Python scripts and AS2, this is not a sentence you would want to throw around seasoned C++ programmers, I learned that pretty quickly though! However, at home I was working hard, trying to learn what all the cool slang from work meant, such as OOP, classes, inheritance and other things that sounded cool at the time. So i brought home a piece of software called FlashDevelop and a library (engine) called Flixel on a USB stick, and then I start trying to do things

(these awesome pieces of software can be found here : http://www.flashdevelop.org/ /  http://flixel.org/ )

I GOT THE POWER!

However I had a lot of issues in the beginning, I didn't know how to setup a project, or where or how to get started, and most importantly, I didn't know how to make stuff appear on the screen - having worked in the Flash IDE normally, the luxury days of drawing stuff and pressing ctrl-enter here gone, I had to code stuff from the ground up now! gulp!

From being at work, and coming home with a new page from the docs (plus bugging the hell out of the aforementioned C++ guys), i quickly got the very basic hang of it, and after a week or so of doing top-shitty code I had the following:

It's like... animated and stuff!!

This might not look like much, and while you are totally right in thinking that, for me at the time it was a huge achievement, it has buttons, rain and thunder! And it has a cool graphic background! - It almost looks like a game menu! While doing this "prototype" I started to understand the very basic concept of Object Oriented Programming and what it really meant to code something and see it work - and that felt awesome!

In the next coming posts I will share more of the small projects I did during that time and talk about how I went about learning more about programming!

- Cheers,
Rune Rask