What the Hell Am I Doing Here?

It’s been a while, and I owe you all an explanation.

Last August, I was in a car accident where someone rear-ended me. Any car accident you can walk away from is a good one, but I did get a consolation prize - I ended up with a severe concussion and a bulged disk in the C3 and C4 vertebrae of my spine. I was out of work for almost three months, and it took a long time before I could even look at a computer screen without getting a headache.

Reading became nearly impossible, and even dealing with numbers became a considerable challenge. Imagine trying to program when you can't remember more than three or four numbers in a row. It was a difficult time, and the cognitive issues I sustained from the accident lingered for months after I was finally able to return to work.

It's taken me almost nine months to recover and get back to a point where I can start writing and programming again. I'm finally ready to start sharing my work, and I'm excited to do so. I know many of you initially subscribed to PixelVision 8 content, but I'm no longer working on that. However, my love for making games, tools, and game engines is still very much alive. I plan on building off of what I learned from PixelVision 8 and sharing as much of that knowledge as I can. Plus, with over 25 years of professional development experience, I have plenty of stories and insights that I’d like to share.

I’m working on a couple of new projects now, like reviving my game design notebook. Right before my accident, I was writing a new basic interpreter in C# with the help of ChatGPT and creating a game sketchpad inspired by my previous work on Pixel Vision 8. I’m resuming work on those. I’m also developing a new project management app - meant specifically for side projects - built on top of Preact and Tauri. It’s designed for non-tech people or those who don’t want to deal with complex tools like Gantt charts or who find Notion too unstructured. It’s a tool I desperately need for all of my own side projects, and I’m eager to share more about it with you as I dog-food it through its development.

So, here’s the plan: I want to evolve this newsletter into something that represents everything I do. If you’re up for the journey, I’d love for you to stick around. I promise it will be interesting. To make things easier, I am separating each of these topics into their own email subscriptions so you can choose what to get and what to ignore. Simply log into your Substack account and toggle the ones you want or don’t want. I’ll be adding some new categories like “that time I…” for stories from my past jobs, “projects” to cover updates for all of my new stuff, and I’d like to continue to build out “what da prompt” for all my AI stuff.

Oh, and another thing. I grew my company’s developer YouTube channel from 60k subs to 1m last year, so I’m excited to share some of the lessons I learned and create more video content on my own YouTube channel. I’ve been playing around with a heavily modded build of Fallout 4, and I’m getting ready to start posting shorts, so I’ll throw some of that on here as well.

Thank you for your patience and understanding while I’ve been MIA. I had a challenging year leading up to stopping development on Pixel Vision 8, and then the car accident really robbed me of the past ten months. However, your support means a lot to me. I can’t wait to dive back into our projects and discussions.