Reports of my departure are greatly exaggerated
Hey Everyone! Happy Thorium Thursday!
First, the good news: I got a job! I'm starting at an agency called Echobind on July 5th, and feeling really grateful that the job hunt went so quickly. Thanks to all of you who sent in well-wishes - it really warmed my heart. ❤️
And now for some not so good news. As it turns out, losing your job take a toll on the psyche. After taking some time to reflect, I decided to pause work on Thorium Nova to focus on other things.
... That was two weeks ago, you all got the email. In the days that followed, I found myself completely lost, without direction. My days lacked meaning, outside of putting in job applications and chasing down leads. It felt there was something missing...
Oh. Yeah. It's Thorium.
So! You might have noticed during the past week that I have immersed myself in Thorium Nova development. My work has included
- 5 new open issues
- 8 pull requests (those inclined to programming are welcome to review them!)
- 2 feature discussions
In fact, I would love your thoughts on either of the discussions: Units Units Units and The Power Grid.
So, what do all of theses numbers even represent?
- I spent a ton of time thinking about, diagramming, and prototyping how power distribution will work - see the discussion above to read my conclusions.
- I put together the interstellar starmap view for the Flight Director screen.
- I added the rotation autopilot to point a ship towards its destination
- I started working on the inventory plugin for defining inventory items
- I defined the shipping containers which will be used to transfer cargo between rooms on the ship
- I implemented a pathfinding algorithm to allow passengers on the ship to know how to get to a room
Yep, lots of work across the board, but there's a lot more to be done. That's where you come in.
The Return of Development Meetings
I personally found a lot of value from our fortnightly (that's every-other-week) meetings. I got to meet the folks interested in Thorium Nova, give potential contributors a tour of the codebase, discover new ideas and concepts to use in Thorium, and show a little bit of accountability about what I've been up to.
I want to bring the meetings back, but I would love to find a time that works for more people, if possible. If you have wanted to attend these meetings, but couldn't because of the date or time, please get in touch. Either reply to this email or reach out on Discord with the dates and times that would work best for you. Hopefully that gives more of you an opportunity to engage with the rest of the community and have your voice be heard.
I can't promise that development will continue at the same feverish pace, especially once I start my new job, but for now it feels good to be making so much progress.
That's all for this week. Thanks for being on this journey with me. Remember "how wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." ❤️