What are you planning to learn in 2022?

x64k

1 hour ago

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I got two things on my list for now.

• Unity. So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly moving away from embedded systems work, which was pretty sad, actually, because I love it and I really didn’t want to do that, but I didn’t have much of a choice. Entirely by accident, I ended up doing some game development and I might have a pretty cool contract lined up next year, so I have basically taken a very long detour to fulfilling my mission from back when I was nine and I decided I want to learn programming to make my own games (naturally). Unity, as you know, is pretty big in this field. I’ve already learned enough of it to be dangerous but it’s not exactly second-nature to me, and I need it to be.

• Exploit writing. For the longest time I’ve hovered at the borders of “real” security work, again, mostly by accident. Writing crypto code or doing security audits was never formally a part of my job description but I occasionally lent a hand whenever weird hardware and electricity were involved. I’ve also worked on hardware and software that was relevant in this field, and it’s been a long-time interest of mine, too. So this year – now that I don’t have to chase embedded projects anymore – I may have a little more time for it, and this looks as good a place as any to get started with.

Background stuff:

• Lua. Python has been my go-to scripting language for a long time now but today, managing anything written in Python is a pain in the ass. I’m sick of nursing pip and virtualenv and whatnot for hours just to cobble together a ten-line script. I’ve played a little with Lua, a language I’ve been interested in for years now, and I like it and I think I might just run with it.

• Rust. I’ve been slowly absorbing it over the past couple of years, to the point where I could write and play with a very simple OS kernel in the background. Unfortunately, it’s excruciatingly slow work, and it’s not particularly rewarding. It feels like I’m doing cool stuff about 20% of the time, and the rest of the time is spent tricking the compiler into doing something useful, and I’m not enthusiastic enough about the language to frame it as “it’s forcing you to make good design decisions”. I’m also not yet convinced it’s worth it in the long run, so I’m taking it slow.

• Swift and macOS development. It’s been nearly a year since I switched to this thing and, other than Homebrew being a pain in the ass, I sort of like it. I don’t like everything about it, but a year without having to debug why systemd won’t restart my computer or start my VPN tunnel again, without firing up a game only to find out sound is coming out my monitor instead of my speakers again, without any pretentious drama pouring out of the GTK ivory tower… I don’t like my computer, but I’m content with it, and not by using it like a PDP-11 with a fancy graphical terminal. Only problem is I know jack shit about programming this thing because last time I wrote something for a Mac, the OS X flavour of the day was Tiger. Now I keep coming at it like it’s a weird FreeBSD machine, and I think it’s time I did something about it. Thing is, though, I’ve used FOSS systems for so long I’m not sure I want to do it. Apple is a huge commercial vendor, and I’m not sure I want to invest much in a system that, ten years from now, might decree computers are obsolete and start selling me iPads that I can’t do anything on without an iCloud account…