TaleSpire Dev Log 450

On the last community stream, someone asked whether Bouncyrock gives us employees time to do our own projects. I said that we don’t have an official policy around it but are always open to any of us requesting that. I’m not sure if it stuck in my head, but I realized having a few study days a month would be really helpful.

So, this month, I’ve started a habit I hope to keep up with going forward. I’ll take three work days for study towards the end of each month. Like most folks, I’ve got years of bookmarks and a bunch of books in the queue to read, and having dedicated time to get into things will be great.

I took my first one on Monday, and Thursday was my second. I’m unsure if any of this will interest you, but here we go.

I’ve started working through Projective Geometric Algebra Illuminated, a fascinating book by Dr. Eric Lengyel. I’m no mathematician, but my hope is that this will provide tools that unify a bunch of different mathematical concepts I’ve dealt with before. It seems to set things out in a way that extends naturally across and between various dimensions.

I’m slowly working through the first chapter, which revisits the classical approaches. I’ve reached quaternions and got a bit stuck doing the (admittedly simple) derivations of the multiplication rules. I bashed my head against it for a bit, and after a chat with Chairmander, I understood what I got wrong. Good progress, but by then my brain was a little cooked on the math front, so I decided to switch to something else.[0]

Next up, The Garbage Collection Handbook. This lovely tome is one I’ve started, but got distracted from, before. It’s not directly related to anything I’m making, but memory management is always a fundamental concern, and reading about all the approaches and trade-offs of such a practical problem is very cool. I happy whiled away some time reading the first chapter and am excited to jump into the second in my next session.

In the evening, I had a real treat. The font designer who is making the TaleSpire font graciously spared a bunch of time to talk about fonts with me! Getting to sit down with anyone who is an expert in something is a blast, and two hours just FLEW by. Amongst learning lots of random things about the challenges in making fonts, I also got to see our new font[2], which is nearing a testable state. Having proper support for Latin and Cyrilic will be great, and we have a good idea of where to start with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) support too.

All in all, Thursday was grand.

On Friday I worked on settings, and I’ll take my last study day today[1].

Hope all is well for you folks,

Peace.

Disclaimer: This DevLog is from the perspective of one developer. It doesn’t reflect everything going on with the team

[0] I’m also revisiting good ol’ highschool algebra. There are so many things that have faded from school, so going through those materials has been a nice refresher. [1] Although we are now in September, I’m taking my last study day then as it fits in better with home life. [2] It’s styled very similarly to the current one. But this one is good :P