At the start of 2018, I got the opportunity to be part of the first mini batch at the Recurse Center. Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven programming retreat in NYC aimed at attracting programmers who want to grow their programming chops in a rigorous yet, supportive environment. Students who attend Recurse generally come in with a dedicated project focus. This helps with setting a course and creating a clear purpose through the course of the term, which lasts anywhere between 1 week and six months. During my time at Recurse, which lasted one week (hence mini), I focused on ramping up on WebGL. While 1 week was far too short to get anywhere near mastery, it did give me the space and time to navigate the vastness of core WebGL concepts and chart a semblance of a path to eventual mastery. If you’re curious about this and my learnings from my rather short stint there, check out my musings over on Github as well as my experiments with WebGL/GLSL—the furthest I got was rotating a triangle.
It’s been over a year since I completed my first Recurse batch and that niggling feeling of wanting to continue my forays into WebGL remains. As is often the case, the business of work and life and travel (yay conference life) have kept pulling me away from this work. But with the year reaching a close, and the anxiety of wanting to squeeze in one more thing/life achievement in, I’ve decided to make a concerted effort to try to pick up where I left of. In the spirit of the holidays of course, this learning journey will take the form of an advent calendar and my aim is to learn one small thing every day for the next 24 days.
To keep myself on track, and give some focus to this project, I’ll be focusing specifically on 3D graphics, so I get to call this 3December (get it?). I’ll be learning ThreeJS and alongside that trying to understand the intricacies of what’s happening under the hood in WebGL itself. I’m not sure I’ll gain mastery by the end of this, but I am looking forward to finally scratching that creative itch that I’ve been neglecting for so long.