After a month of hectic Real Stuff I’ve finally got around to doing some of my own coding. And, as usual, it’s a work colleague’s fault.

I was speaking to Paul about general enthusiasm for coding and realised that sometimes naivity is great. When you first started coding and you’d just write something for the hell of it. You didn’t worry about overall ‘quality’ because you were doing the best you could imagine. I remember writing platform games, GUIs, Lorenz attractors - well, Paul has some bloody great attractor images from a few years ago. It managed to reignite my interest in the subject so I spent a couple of hours with some C#, SdlDotNet and Forms and managed to get a little app to render different types of Clifford attractors:

cliff

Nice, huh? Just 2d for now, and fixed to the single kind of attractor. Not a bad start though. And the best bit was the mindset I put myself into. Who cares if it’s one class? Heh, I don’t have to rename the GUI elements, so I won’t. It’s resulted in a hideous looking 508 lines of code, but a fully functional app. Now I can go back and rewrite the same functionality with a higher ‘quality’ bar and with more extensibility.