What did I do in 2017? My plan, from my post a year ago, was:

  1. Help other people make interactive tutorials.
  2. Work on projects that lead to tutorials, instead of starting with the tutorials.

For the first goal:

I'm pretty happy with how that went.

For the second goal:

Although I did work on many small projects, I didn't work on any big projects. I have mixed feelings about this.

Other things:

  • I moved my site to a cheaper, faster web server
  • I converted my site to https, which was quite a bit more complicated than I thought it would be
  • I converted over 500 of my web pages from fixed width layouts to “responsive design”, and wrote an article about how it works ; it was a bit harder for my two column layouts
  • I made incremental improvements to most of my web pages (wording, diagrams, interaction, etc.)
  • I spent way too much time studying the color yellow
  • I made a tool to turn an image into a polygon mesh, originally intended for map generation (you'd paint a map in MS Paint and then turn it into polygons) but more fun as an art tool
  • I occasionally answered questions on stack overflow or reddit with interactive demos like this and this and this
  • I made a creepy procedural animation of a bacterial cell
  • I tracked these things on my trello page

What do I want to do in 2018?

  • I learned a lot from my map experiments this year, and I'd like to produce some useful tutorials and demos from them. Several techniques could be added to the existing map generator.
  • From working with others I was reminded how valuable iteration is. I want to go back to my older tutorials and update them.
  • I want to continue working with game developers on algorithms that could turn into future tutorials.
  • I want to write a tutorial on coordinate systems and cameras. I've tried this before but maybe the third time's the charm?
  • I'd like to write a few more tutorials about writing interactive tutorials.
  • I want to become faster at writing tutorials. Part of this is managing scope but part of it is using better libraries that let me reinvent less each time.

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