My last update on this blog is from 2020, just after a game jam in between jobs. The last couple of years has been crazy, between the world events that everybody knows about and my professional life. During this time, I had the time to lead a small team of soft dev and get a lot of responsibility. Although it was a rich experience, and I’m much wiser (I hope not too cynical), it took most of my time and energy.

This week, I participated in Python Discord’s 2020 GameJam. GameJams are sort of hackathon for games, often video games. In limited time and from scratch, you have to build a video game alone or with a small team, in a limited time, from a few hours to several days! The aim of this game jam was to use the arcade game framework with Python. I already told you about arcade and how clear and simple it is, in my last article.

Recently, I had the opportunity to train and discover various algorithms to improve my Python skills but also programming skills in general. After some weeks of training, on a lazy Sunday, I was wondering how easy it would be to code a simple minesweeper game. I discovered the Arcade library on an episode of Talk Python to Me where the creator, Paul Craven, was invited. I was impressed with how simple and clear the library was (compared, in my opinion, to Tkinter which I talk about in my previous blog post here ).

Hello there! It’s been a while but I didn’t abandon this blog. However, I will talk today of an abandoned project of mine and why it still has value for me. A great way to learn anything is having little projects. It helps confronts your theoretical knowledge to reality and make you resolve problems. As a self-taught hobbyist programmer it’s especially important to me, because it’s the only form of evaluation I can get.

Hi again! This blog article is a follow up on my refactoring attempt of a biology project. Go read part 1 if you have missed it! First task was to make the code more readable and easier to modify. Without changing how the variable were stored or the logic of the program, i just made helper function of the repetition. So, for the code of the earlier blog post: