Bones' Blog of Stuff About Things

Work has me spending a lot of time actually coding for a change, and that’s leaving me a bit burned out in the evenings for making much progress on the game. I imagine that if there was a clean thread of work to pick up that I wouldn’t find it so hard, but I always end up just staring at the same half-done page or re-discovering where I put the template files or something equally unproductive for about half an hour before making any progress.

I’m not really helping myself by getting kind of sucked into the Python Challenge, which eats into my available time and reserves of concentration for the day. It is a lot of fun, and a really great way to exercise your coding muscles. Even if you program on a daily basis, you still tend to find that parts of your skill-set aren’t being used and they get rusty and this sort of thing forces you to deal with string parsing or file handling or whatever other area you avoid otherwise. In many ways it reminds me of the value gained from trying the problems set in Programming Pearls — an exercise that deserves repeating every so often just to blow the dust off some of the less frequently used brain cells.

Anyway, with the Christmas weekend approaching, I doubt I’ll be making any great leaps forward and I won’t be feeling too guilty about it. However, I’m getting very fed-up with still not having truly got to grips with the relationship between the browser interface, server-side page code and the underlying game server process and database so that I can not waste so much time scratching my head over issues like how to layout the map page with dynamic links behind images in tables in a frame using the Django templates.