#the100dayproject

It’s been a year since my last post and many things happen in between. Moved job to eBay, did a talk about my startup twindly at Berlin Google DevFest 2014, and finished last position (for my age group) at Berlin half marathon 2015 😀

It’s quite hard to find time for your hobby when you have 2 jobs. I only played a few games last year but rarely have time to sketch.

Then last March, my wife joined #the100dayproject. The idea of the project is you can do whatever you want for 100 days and publish it on Instagram every day. I said to myself, why not? I could use this opportunity to do my daily sketch.

What should I sketch, monsters? crazy characters? or game design? I haven’t sketch for long time so it must be hard to come up with new idea everyday. I should start with something that I’m familiar with.

I check my Instagram and I have a lots of food pictures. Yes, I’m that guy who always take food picture before you eat it 🙂 Sketching food seems like a good idea!

So I decided to post my daily food sketches to my Instagram with hashtag #100daysoffoodsketch

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It’s all started with BASIC

I got my first computer 24 years ago, when I was 10 years old. It was a Wearnes computer with Intel 80286 processor. I didn’t know or have any idea about programming but I know how to operate a computer. I got basic computer lesson from school on how to operate a computer (booting using a floppy disk, Ctrl-Alt-Del, and basic DOS commands) and write document using WordStar.

It was my friend who introduce me to BASIC. He typed a couple of lines on GWBASIC and displayed my name in different colors.

Print "Ilham Abiyasa Suhardi"

PRINT “Ilham Abiyasa Suhardi” (emulated using dosbox)

I was like “Wow, you can do that with a computer? That’s amazing!!!!”. And that’s exactly the moment I was introduced & fall in love with programming.

On that day, we explored some other commands like changing colors, blinking text, and making a beep sound. After that, I borrow his dad’s book BASIC language reference (Can’t remember the exact title) and made a copy so I could try it by myself at home. That’s when I start to learn computer programming and I’ve been loving it ever since.

So thank you my friend (where ever you are) and happy birthday BASIC!

Berlin Half Marathon

Wow, it’s almost April and I haven’t write anything since January 2014 😀

Quite busy with many things lately, from building our own startup with my wife, learning about cloud technology, to training for half marathon. Yes, half marathon and we’re going to race this Sunday.

To begin with, I’m not a good runner. I run regularly, like twice a month, but only for short distance in a slower pace. I love to see people running Berlin marathon but I always thought long distance running is too much for me.

Then, on November 2013, my wife registered us for the Berlin half marathon 😀 She’s not a runner, just like me, but she said, “it’s time to say yes to ourselves”.

It’s true what she said. Since January, we run 2 or 3 times a week. On weekend, we tried to run long distance. We started with 5KM and gradually increase the distance. Two weeks ago, we managed to run around 18KM on the weekend (and then I caught cold on the next week 😀 ).

Our aim is just to finish the race in 3 hours. It’s not so fast for some people (especially Germans 🙂 ) but for me, I want to enjoy the run and the scenery. That’s the only time where you can run around the city, on big streets without cars or bicycles, and have a lot of people cheering up for you.

Happy running!

Sketches & Recap from 2013

I thought I didn’t sketch that much last year. Then I realized that I managed to fill up my small Moleskine sketchbook which I’ve started to sketch on since 2010. It was 50% empty in the beginning of 2013 & filled up last November.

My idea of sketching is not to make (great) art but just because I love to do it. It’s kinda meditative & nice way to catch a moment or thing. So I decided to share few of them along with my 2013 recaps 😉

Game Jams

I started to do game jam. I joined #1GAM which is to make 1 game for every month. It didn’t work for me, only managed to submit 2 games. I made some demos on my GitHub and tutorials for my CreateJS presentation but they’re not considered as a full playable game 😉 At least I managed to do a 8-hour game jam last July at Berlin Mini Game Jam.

Vacation in Indonesia

On March, we had 3-weeks vacation at my home country. We went to Bangka Island. The beaches were so beautiful and the seafood were so great. I didn’t sketch that much, too busy enjoying life 🙂

Meetups. Lots of them

This year we attended lots of meetups/workshops, mostly about tech & startups. It’s really hot things in Berlin. Since mid of this year, we’re starting our startup (mostly my wife, I’m just helping her a little bit) so we need to do a lot of learning & networking. Continue reading

Flash/Flex: Keep Calm and Carry On

source: Wikipedia

Keep calm and carry on. That was NOT my reaction when I read Adobe news about Flash Player for mobile. And then came another bad news about Flex SDK on the following day.

It was difficult for me. I was sad and a bit broken hearted. It’s even harder if you are surrounded by Flash-haters. It take times for me to recover. But this makes me realize that how much I (and probably other programmers) really love Flash platform.

I started playing with Flash since it was Flash 5. Then came Flash MX 2004 with ActionScript 2.0, and then AS3.0 which I like most. I’ve tried many things like JavaScript & even VBScript, not to mention other languages such as Pascal, C/C++, C#. After a quite long journey, I find Flash/Flex + AS3.0 fits me for making games.

Technology keeps on changing and getting better. Unfortunately, HTML5 isn’t ready and mature yet for game development. There are many things HTML5 has to catch up with. Don’t get me wrong, I think HTML5 has potential. In fact, I recommend you to start learning things like WebGL or trying Javascript-based frameworks.

But despite what people say, I think Flash will NOT die in the next 2-3 years. In fact, if you’re a game developer, this is the best time to use Flash. Finally Adobe starts focusing more in game development. There will be many exciting features ahead. Stage3D is still new and we haven’t seen the best things out of it yet. Molehill2, Starling/ND2D, concurrency, Flash Player 12, fantastics Flash-based 3D or game engines, and many more!

It’s also too early to say that this is the end of Flex. Spoon foundation haven’t start something big yet but I’d like to be optimist. By giving Flex framework governance to the open source foundation, Flex future and roadmap can be deciced independently from Adobe’s business or political agenda 😉 Isn’t that great?

So don’t panic, don’t rush. We stil have enough time, either to switch to HTML/JS/CSS, finish your Flash-based game engine, or do other stuff. No one knows what the future will be. Take your time for getting angry or sad, but after that, clear your head and keep your chin up. It might take 2 years (or even more) until HTML5 is good enough and able to catch up everything that Flash can do TODAY. Meanwhile, Flash is still here and keeps evolving.

So carry on, let’s code better Flash games or Flex RIA 😉