I feel like I haven’t posted in too long. I guess it has been nearly a week! The holiday break spoiled me. Getting back into the grind has taken a toll on both my free time and my motivation to sit down and write, both code and posts… I did make some good progress over the weekend, and I wanted to ride that wave into finishing my backgammon project, but I stalled out once I was in total control of my two kids all day!

Even though I don’t get to (sometimes don’t want to) sit in front of the keyboard as much, I am still working out the logistics of the final steps of my program. The biggest chunk is working on a way to check the board for all valid moves and allow the player to end their turn if there are none left. Backgammon has some interesting ideas about when you can pass your turn and when you can’t that make is less than perfectly straightforward. I think my plan is to break it down into two distinct units. One will do the checking and the other will hold the rules. That way I can incrementally build a smarter and smarter validator, instead of trying to do it all in one shot.

My punchlist is around here somewhere, I wanted to update my progress on that, but I think it might be under one of my programming books, which itself has become a resting place for a baby bottle and a mostly empty and totally cold cup of coffee. Briefly, I figured out why my event handlers weren’t working (developer error) and wrote a few to handle clicks. It’s no very easy to use the dice to move the checkers around, although I need some UI/UX tweaks to make it more obvious what is going on.

One thing that has been a big boost to my motivation is reading the blogs of several other people in similar situations. Seeing what they are doing with their knowledge is really pretty inspiring. Thank you!

If you’re not following these blogs, you should:

• Our Code
• Teacher Learns to Code
• Rails Mama
• Part Timer
• Doc turning coder