About
Hi! I go by NANDquark or just Quark in various places.
In our modern world, it is so easy to let time pass us by, watching videos, playing games, and doom-scrolling online as fatigue and anxiety build up with no good outlet. Our jobs in tech feel like a constant churn of features and bugs, frameworks and technologies, each new and different yet they all blur together. The many layers and abstractions of software that we must suffer through seem unavoidable. Some try to escape this with side-hustles and startups but even so it means trading time programming for time running a business instead.
To combat this negativity I have begun a journey to dive deeper into the machine to learn low-level programming. I am inspired by the ideas of Casey Muratori through Handmade Hero, Ryan Fleury with his excellent articles and Tsoding with his amusing approach to recreational programming. By following their examples I have found a way to break the cycle and recover my passion for programming by researching and building many toy projects such as a falling sand simulator, a simple voxel engine, and several small game prototypes.
My next goal is to focus this joy I have found in recreational programming toward building software applications and games in a fully hand-made fashion with limited or no external dependencies. Many of the subjects of my work will be reinventing the wheel but by building them I gain knowledge and experience about a much wider range of programming practices. As I implement the low-level tools and frameworks that I need, perhaps I will find a true passion project that is worth polishing and releasing to the world. And if not, that is okay too because the journey itself is valuable.
This blog is a place to document my learnings and share them with others who may be on similar journeys. Writing also serves as a tool to synthesize the knowledge I have gained to solidify my understanding of new topics and uncover further insights along the way.
You can find my long form blog posts in the Posts section, and smaller learnings in Today I Learned.