What I did in 2017

What did I do in 2017? My plan, from my post a year ago, was:

1. Help other people make interactive tutorials.


2. Work on projects that lead to tutorials, instead of starting with the tutorials.

For the first goal:

• I met several people working on interactive tutorials / explorable explanations, and chatted with many more online. It was great to talk to other people making these kinds of tutorials!


• I was a mentor for Google Summer of Code, working with a student on interactive diagrams for Russell & Norvig's AI textbook, AI: A Modern Approach. He made the diagrams for chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 6. After the summer was over, I helped other students make diagrams for chapter 2, chapter 5, chapter 21, and chapter 22.


• I worked with a game developer on a tutorial (we didn't finish but I learned a lot)


• I made an interactive tutorial about making interactive tutorials, including a section on how to make “scrubbable” numbers like the ones in Bret Victor's Tangle library.

I'm pretty happy with how that went.

For the second goal:

• I worked on some small projects for Nonagon Games (including minimap-painter, some redis experiments, a serialization library, another map painter, a map renderer, resource placement)


• I worked on many procedural map generation experiments (for Nonagon Games, but also for a future tutorial)


• From these projects I wrote a dual mesh data structure library, added a setction about ridges to one of my tutorial pages, and made an HTML5 version of my polygon map generator.

Although I did work on many small projects, I didn't work on any big projects. I have mixed feelings about this.

Other things:

• I moved my site to a cheaper, faster web server


• I converted my site to https, which was quite a bit more complicated than I thought it would be


• I converted over 500 of my web pages from fixed width layouts to “responsive design”, and wrote an article about how it works ; it was a bit harder for my two column layouts


• I made incremental improvements to most of my web pages (wording, diagrams, interaction, etc.)


• I spent way too much time studying the color yellow


• I made a tool to turn an image into a polygon mesh, originally intended for map generation (you'd paint a map in MS Paint and then turn it into polygons) but more fun as an art tool


• I occasionally answered questions on stack overflow or reddit with interactive demos like this and this and this


• I made a creepy procedural animation of a bacterial cell


• I tracked these things on my trello page

What do I want to do in 2018?

• I learned a lot from my map experiments this year, and I'd like to produce some useful tutorials and demos from them. Several techniques could be added to the existing map generator.


• From working with others I was reminded how valuable iteration is. I want to go back to my older tutorials and update them.


• I want to continue working with game developers on algorithms that could turn into future tutorials.


• I want to write a tutorial on coordinate systems and cameras. I've tried this before but maybe the third time's the charm?


• I'd like to write a few more tutorials about writing interactive tutorials.


• I want to become faster at writing tutorials. Part of this is managing scope but part of it is using better libraries that let me reinvent less each time.