Jake Haas Blog - Back Online

About this blog:

The reason I started this blog is because as a computer science student I have read many online resources about how to do many things with programing, and after sifting throught endless amounts of web pages I now realize many things I should have learned sooner rather than later. In this blog I have many examples of programs that I have written, and have step by step instructions of my thought process while writing them along with the source code and references to external resources.

The image to the right is a flowfield created using perlin noise and a javascript library called P5.js. If I could go back into the past and tell myself one thing it would be to learn p5.js and javascript. P5 is a very simple graphics library that allows you to get instant visual feedback from even the most basic code, making a primitive shape is a simple as writing a hello world application in javascript. I think it is really important for people who are new to programing to be able to see something happen when they write code, for me personally writing code for my first time in IDLE(a python interpereter) was great at first seeing the computer write "hello world", but eventually became boring as I started learning more advanced concepts. In javascript, using P5.js a beginner would be able to apply their newly found knowlege of programming in a way that they can see on the screen as something other than text. Imagine learning object oriented programing for the first time and being able to make a creature or an object that you could actually see and make multiples of using classes!!! That being said it is surprizing to me how late in the game so to speak that I found out about P5.js and how little credit javascript gets as being a great beginner language.

It seems like i've been rambling on about javascript for a while now but its fine, this is my blog... I can ramble if I want.. So when I was first learning to program I started with Python because the internet told me it was a good place to start(which it was) but after I felt like I understood most of the programing consepts I was learning I moved on to C++ because after some reasearch it seemed like the most popular language used for what im interesed in(desktop applications), and after watching a series of 73 tutorials from theNewBoston on youtube I finally understood a bit about C++ and wanted to start working with graphics, after a couple Google searches I figured that learning OpenGL was a good idea. I was using Visual Studeo 2015 and before I could start coding anything I had to set up the IDE to use the OpenGL, SDL, SOIL, and LoadPNG libraries. This should have been fairly simple but even after weeks of trying and countless tutorials I could not for the life of me figure it out. This lead to about a month of sulking and thinking that I was never going to be a good developer. That was about a year ago and just last week I revisited C++ and found out I could do what I wanted to do using only the SDL library!! D: I was soo mad!! Moral of the story, make sure you reaserch what you want to learn BEFORE trying to take on something your not ready for.