At the end of last year, I took a bit of a hiatus from blogging and my other projects. I found that I needed a break from my current projects, and to work on something totally unrelated. One of the things I try to do each year is to challenge myself to learn a new skill. Early last year, I took to learning Javascript properly. Through my work at Points (especially on the redesign of the SouthWest Rapid Rewards inline Buy app) and on Rookeries, I got significantly better at Javascript and frontend web development. I also briefly played around with writing server-side apps in Node.

So I challenged myself in December to learn to develop apps using C++ and Qt. Using the Game Programming in Qt book and Cherno’s Learning C++ YouTube series, I managed to learn the basics of Qt and C++. In fact I was very pleasantly surprised. Learning C++ can be hard but I got it. Maybe as the cppcon 2015 talk about learning C++ points out, that learning C++ is hard, because learning old K&R style C first and then getting into C++ is hard. (Pointers are hard, especially if you get into pointer to pointer to array of pointers hell.) But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Qt book and working on visual and projects that I never imagined I’d ever work at, really motivated me to learn. Below I’ve included screenshots of some of the projects I worked on:

While I am far from calling myself an expert in Qt. C++ can be needlessly complex when use the old idioms and the community seems to be full of overly opinionated people, I am so glad I took the effort to learn C++. Lots of the memory management and macros in Rust, now make sense. Thanks to be Qt book, I understand whyy developers prefer embedding Javascript or Lua over Python in the game engines and embedded devices. (Writing a Python to C++ two-way translation layer is tedious. And this is without worrying about getting the Python standard library working as well.) Also I am pretty convinced that Qt with QML is the state of the art when it comes to UX development. (React and Kivy are far cries in comparison, not that either should be discounted as important technologies.)

Now I am inspired to delve more into native development. I plan on bringing back justcheckers as a Qt/QML based game. I will see if I can help out with some aspects of Qt, Rust and CPython. I am excited not only because I essentially achieved a New Years resolution in the first 2 months or so. But also because actual native development is now something I can do and understand.