LinsenBlog

It’s pretty obvious that I don’t update this very often, but that’s hopefully going to change soon! I’m starting to get back into learning web development and will be taking a few Udemy courses along the way to get my JS chops and internet know-how up to snuff so that I can get this site back on track. I’ll really miss working with Django and Python, but I think I’ll learn a lot from working with JavaScript, Node, and React.js more heavily. I’ll see y’all on the other side, hopefully with a more performant and nice looking website! - Max

So once again, I've neglected my website's blog and have kinda just let the whole thing die. My bad. I feel like I only made this site in the first place as a 'living resume', but I never really had to search for a job so the site just kinda died.

However, despite all that, I do feel it necessary to update this blog every now and then for the sake of whoever may read the blog- or at least as a sort of online diary.

Life Update

Since the last post, I've moved! I'm now living with one of my super close friends in Santa Clara. It a little cheaper than my previous listing, but I get a huge bedroom, walk-in closet, and in-house laundry. Definitely loving it here. I've also purchased an Alesis Strike Pro electronic drumset, so I've been able to play drums at home without disrupting people too much. It works as an amazing stress relief tool! Speaking of huge purchases, I'm also going to be buying/leasing my first car soon! Very excited to finally have a car that hasn't been run into the ground before I even bought it :). I'm also still playing competitive Smash Bros. on and off and will be attending the Genesis 5 tournament for both Melee and Smash4. Wish me luck!

Work Update

Work has been a great mixture of difficult and rewarding. Not only did I get a promotion in October to the next level of engineer, but I also just hit my 2-year mark at Apple since they count previous internships at the company towards my numbers! Really looking forward to what this year has in store.

Twitch Update

My Twitch stream has hit kind-of a rough point over the last few months. I thought my move would allow me to stream more often and that I'd have a better schedule, but I find myself doing more things with friends and my roommate instead of streaming. I'm thinking of disbanding the account altogether since I don't want to waste my time or my followers' time, but every time I do end up streaming, it kinda revitalizes my interest in it and I can't bring myself to quit. I'm gonna try to work something out going forward, and maybe let my roommate know that I just wanna chill and game a few days a week so he doesn't think I'm just ignoring him. Monday, Thursday, and a weekend day seem like a good mix while taking up less than half the nights that I'm home.

Anyway, that's about it for my update. Guess you'll hear from me in another year or so :P.

It's a weird thing being out of school.

I figured the working life would resemble school in the way that I'd be away from home a majority of the week, but have non-work time and weekends free to do whatever I wanted. In a sense I was right - I really do have a lot of extra time. However, all the comments my past co-workers made about being drained after work have began to play true. I'd love to use my spare time to create, to get better at something, but I've only been wanting to loaf around and play games. I'm in this awful rotation of getting into work way too late, getting home even later, and admitting defeat and just staying awake deep into the night for no other reason than the fact that I no longer get tired until 3am.

This whole thing was okay when I was an intern - I'd be going back to school around now, having to be up early for band camp, be outside most of the day, be around friends and meet new people, etc. It was a blast.

I don't have that anymore.

For any other student who just goes through school without doing clubs or anything, they don't have that experience. There isn't that sense of community that gets re-instated every year during college. You don't get new friends for free just because you're in the same "club" as someone like you did in marching band. Now, I just continue things as usual. No changes. No new people. And it's killing me inside.

Don't get me wrong, I have friends in the same area as me and I do see them often enough. But I can't always rely on their lives to constantly sync with mine, especially now that everyone is dating each other :P. Regardless, the point I'm trying to get to is that no matter how comfortable you feel, how close you feel to your friends, or how fine you think you are being "alone" most the time, you will need to think about finding something new.

While the thought seemed intimidating and unnecessary, I'm finding the daily routine (and even some weekly/weekend get togethers) is already getting bland. Additionally, after meeting with an old friend for the first time in nearly a year, I came to another conclusion. As you gain an increasing amount of disconnected friend groups, you soon spend less time per group/person(s) across a given period. This in turn makes moments with these people so much more enjoyable and special since they're not happening all the time. I feel that the combination of these things means I need to start branching out and disregard any insecurities or FOMO (Fear of missing out) I may have. This is why I'm trying to get into competitive melee, why I'm streaming more often, and why I REALLY need to buy or repair my trombone (and join a band).

So yeah. I'll be streaming more often to try and reach more strangers on the internet and be friends with them, attempting to hang out with co-workers after hours, trying to get into competitive melee, looking into local community bands to play with, and much more. I'm looking forward to the next few months of being an adult!

Holy guacamole, we got chips. And by chips I mean a couple of degrees. I finally got an email confirming my satisfaction of the requirements for a B.S. in Computer Science and a Minor in Music! Really happy to be done with it all finally, but in reality, it's going to be reeeally weird adjusting to a brand new life after doing the same thing for 5 years.

The good news is that a good amount of my friends are actually going to be working in the same area as me for the time being. So hangouts and re-living the good 'ol college experience is just a call away, which is something I'm really happy about.

I'm starting at Apple on Monday and couldn't be more excited. I get to go back to doing a job I love, working with a team that not only put out spectacular work, but were a complete joy to work with. The last obstacle in my way of living the dream is negotiating with HR to let me do game jams while working. Worst case scenario, I no longer contribute to the code base and just do Art and Sound. Best case, I get to fully make games on the side. Hopefully I can get something worked out :).

Anyway, packing is calling my name, and I have lots to do in preparation for becoming a real adult. Here's to the future, which is looking pretty dang bright.

It's week 3 of my final quarter of college and here I am in class learning about spiritualism and feminism. This Religious studies class and senior project are the only things I need to conquer in order to graduate.

Last quarter deserves some reflection though. I started senior project with my two better halves, Thomas and Elliot, and we did another game jam (the result of which is now on my projects page!). We also wrote a research paper and submitted a game to the very first annual ICGJ, organized by our advisor and professor, Foaad Khosmood. What a killer experience it was presenting at ICGJ... oh, and also going to GDC a few days later... DURING FINALS.

Really looking forward to what the next few weeks have to offer!

Where to start ...
I suppose a good summary of things that have happened is in store:
1. I've added all the games I've worked on to my Projects page. Check 'em out!
2. I'm going to be going on a London tour in June 2016 with the Cal Poly Jazz Band. So ... that's amazing.
3. I'm finally done with one of my last of 3 quarters in college.

That last one is kind of surreal to me, to be honest. I'll never perform in uniform at a college football game ever again. I'll never perform in a concert hall with ~300 other musicians ever again. I won't be able to participate in away-game trips with the band anymore.

What's funny is that all of these things have to do with being in Cal Poly's marching band. I really can't see myself not being part of it and it being part of my life, but each quarter it gets phased out a little more. I'm really going to miss it - the people, the music, the leadership, and especially the feeling of performing for thousands.
But I digress. There's really not much else to say in this blog post other than I've still been working on music and games and that I'll be done with school soon (even more so since I passed all my classes this quarter, eyyyyyy ...).

So yeah, thanks for reading! Cheers, and happy holidays!

School is back in session and I'm finally about to embark on my final year at college. This year is awesome as I'll be able to focus largely on my senior project since I only have GEs left to conquer. I'm also taking an audio engineering course this fall, so I'll likely be spending a lot more time putting stuff onto SoundCloud (but soon to be Youtube since I'm running out of space).
To summer-ize my summer (heh), I had an exceptional time at Apple and will be joining them full-time after I graduate! So no need to job search this year, I'm set! I really hope to do some more stuff with iOS this year to keep myself in the loop and I'll likely base my senior project around iOS.

That's all I got for now!

My good friend Aaron Jacobs has finally finished his senior project and submitted it to IndieCade for evaluation. How sick is that!? The best part is that I was able to contribute music to his project and be mentioned as a team member, meaning in the case he's selected to showcase at the convention, I'll be able to get in and join him! This is really awesome for me since it's the first time my work will be looked at/ featured in a pretty large setting. I really am humbled that I was approached to compose music for this game even though I have no real background in composition, audio engineering, or mastering. I hope his game does well!

Take a look at my music page to see the full 3 songs I made for the game, and be sure to watch the above trailer and support his game!

So Global Game Jam 2015 happened this past weekend, and my team and I took first place with our Unity game, Sabotage. It was an amazingly fun experience. Not only did I get to work with some really good friends and see a ton of pretty cool games come to fruition, but I also got to learn a brand new language (C#) and framework (Unity) as well as compose some more music! (although one of the songs I'm not so proud of...)

Although Unity does port to web quite easily, we build the game to be played using Xbox controllers, and thus, don't have a readily available demo that I can tack onto my website. That will change soon hopefully! Big shout out to Thomas Steinke, Elliot Fiske, and Aaron Jacobs. Here's to another win next year!

So I didn't get a job, and that's ok!

But it's surprising how some bad news really hits you.

It sucks immensely at first, especially if you have to still confront the person who gave you said news immediately after hearing it. Then there's the mourning period where you just sit in awe and realize X thing isn't a thing anymore. Kind of a 'GG no re' but in real life. After, you have the solitude period where you want to revert to your brooding teenage years and try to think of a reason to reeeeaalllly be sad. You then spring into the anger portion, violently venting your frustration in whatever manner that is the least harmful to your well being... (so you think)

Then you enter the recovery period

Damn is it reassuring to have people tell you "everything is going to be ok", and its even better to realize it yourself. After the vent period, you get mad and bring up all the reasons X thing should not have happened. Reading/playing/saying whatever was vented back to yourself makes you realize "dang, I really actually am not deserving of X. I'm good. I'm really good. Huh. I will be ok after all. Everyone's right."

The purpose of this post is to basically say:
I had a bad day
I'm taking one down
I sing a sad song just to turn it around
I say I don't know
I tell me don't lie
I work at a smile and I go for a ride
etc.etc.

But really though, do yourself a solid and consult friends when stuff happens. They're a helpful bunch.

So I've been working on a job application for Riot Games the past few weeks and actually have a phone interview with them on Monday! How exciting! Great thing that I lost my phone last week and don't have a replacement yet! :D ... :( [It's ok though, I have Wi-Fi calling on my new loaner phone]

Anyway, part of the application process required doing a programming test in which I created something I called the "Spellimobulator". You can see it here! BUT PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THATS HOLY DO NOT USE IT JUST YET (as of 2015 its ok tho).

Why am I so adamant about this!? Well, Riot released a new champion called Kalista. She's a pretty awesome champion in the fact that her 'gimmick' consists of having an un-cancellable auto attack, but she can do a slight dodge-jump after each attack. It's really a cool concept, but of course seems quite difficult to master. Anywho, one of her abilities works interestingly in the fact that it gets a 0 second cooldown if you kill an enemy. My application would normally have a 'special case' function written for this ability to help better calculate its DPS. Of course, I haven't done that yet since school is conquering my life (thanks, 4000 word ethics paper). So, if I am calculating DPS by taking damage/cooldown, cooldown is marked as '0' in the API, and I stupidly do not have any try/except blocks to catch division by 0... then you can see what happens.

So Kalista did introduce a bug into my app, but it's good that she did. It's a pretty glaring bug. Any time you have division there should be either a 100% certainty you will never get a divisor of 0, OR you can just have something in place to handle the division by 0 when it happens. The text-based interface for Spellimobulator actually did have a try/catch block, but my web implementation does not. I'll definitely be fixing things before a certain company calls me on Monday, so expect it to be working by then. Geez thanks, Kalista

It's an odd feeling, but with over 300 games (thanks Steam family sharing) on PC, 20 on the Wii U, and 7 on my PS4, I still feel like I have nothing to play. I mean, sure there are a good amount of titles that I own that I've never launched, and even more that I've half-played and left unfinished, but why?

Time.

I just don't have the time to get invested in a nice, long, wonderfully made game. College really drains a person's life. Most days I'm going from 8am to 8pm at school either in class or doing some form of work. So what do I want to do when I get home? Relax, eat dinner, shower, and sleep. There really isn't enough time for me to meaningfully spend playing games like I could in high school, especially since games have been a big part of my life since I was in elementary school.

With all that said, I'm now starting to see why games like DOTA and League of Legends are so popular. They provide little 20-40 minute skirmishes that require no real investment into a storyline or control scheme. There's items, a few hero abilities, and a simple goal. I even find myself playing ARAM on LoL when I have a few minutes of free time just because its some good fun in a small time scale. Why don't I spend 20m on Wind Waker? Or Deus Ex? Or Wonderful 101? I could go on. My personal reason is because I want to really get the best experience possible by playing for as long as possible.

In short, I'm really excited for winter break to come so I can finally tear through some of my backlog, that is unless Smash for Wii U takes up my life...