Category: general

Which one, which one…

There are so many development topics I want to cover, it’s hard to know where to start. I want to talk about projects I’ve worked on in the past (there have been a LOT of them), but I also want to talk about new projects that I am curently starting.

I’m currently unemployed right now (and looking for work!), but in my now expanded spare time, I’m trying to learn some new technologies, while bolstering my knowledge of some things I’ve done in the past.

So perhaps I’ll start off with my list of current projects that I’m starting, in no particular order:

All of these projects will be hosted on GitHub (actually, some already are), and as I work through development, I’ll be making sure to update the source code and supporting files there.

Here : https://github.com/rgmarquez?tab=repositories

Incidentally, I do tend to keep a lot of notes and lists, from lists of projects I’m working on, to lists of features (specs?), to lists of bugs that I’d like to fix, to cool features that I’d like to add. When I’m working professionally, Iuse Atlasian’s Jira (https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira) to keep track of projects, features, and bugs. However, for my simple experimental projects, I tend to use simpler tools like Apple’s “Notes” app when I’m working strictly on my Mac Laptop, or Evernote when I will be switching between my Mac laptop and my Windows laptop.

For example, the “spec” for my gift/wishlist app looks like this:

It should be noted that I like to develop my own apps in stages, starting with a “minimal viable product”, or even a “prototype”; I don’t want to start with every feature that can be imagined, I want to start with something that will be useful, while uncovering issues that I may not have thought about when starting a project (the “unknown unknowns”). Additionally, I like to start small to make sure that the product is something useful, to make sure that I am “building the right product” as well as “building the product right”.

For now, one of the main goals for these projects is learning new things, and reinforcing old skills, so for many of them, “usefulness” (other than as an example for others) may not be a major concern. 😉

Embark on a Coding Journey: From Embedded Systems to Blockchain and Beyond

Greetings to anyone reading this! This blog was a long time coming; I had originally created this blog back in May of 2015, with the intent of creating an interactive discussion, spanning the wide range of software development projects I have been involved with in my many years design and programming.

My career so far has been nothing short of crazy; I’ve written applications ranging from one of the original “map/tile editors” used in games for the original Sega Genesis and SNES, to mobile (iOS and Android) applications that wirelessly communicated with fitness equipment to optimize your work-out, to tools, game engines and games for MANY platforms (MS-DOS, Windows 95, Amiga, Playstation, 3DO), to back-end services and game systems for Amazon Prime and Scopely, to front-end applications for configuring Live-Ops game events, to embedded system programming in assembly language (Sega Genesis) and C (Intellivision Amico Controller), to blockchain/smart contract code for in-game items, to data analytics pipelines/ETLs for graphing game events.

Most of my career has been involved with games or computer entertainment in some capacity, with the exceptions of periods with the Amazon Prime team and San Luis Aviation.

The point being is this: I am a generalist. I have experience with a whole lot of practices, methodologies, and bad habits from multiple software disciplines, which hopefully means I can bring some cross-domain insight into software development based on my experience.

It also means that I can do a little bit of everything, including creating crazy cross domain projects; imagine a project integrating games, AI, blockchain, analytics, and front-end tools all in one, hopefully simple to understand project. There is a lot to be learned from cross-domain projects, and I hope to make this blog a chronicle of my ongoing learning.

So if you are game for this journey, welcome aboard; and if you have any expertise in any of the things I will be chronicling, definitely feel free to speak up and set me straight. It is hard to bruise my ego, and I’d rather learn together than pretend I am always right.

Welcome!