There has been a long silence here. So, what’s happening at Kaffeine?
Well… Not a whole lot. I was busy with my personal and academic life, and still am. But I think I am recovering from what was quite a dark time, so here I am writing this update.
Kaffeine Software: Still alive!
SketchPad 3.x is a major project, and I’m resuming work on it. SketchPad 2.x received a minor update to be compliant with new Play Store policies and Scoped Storage is causing some breakage. ALPHA 2.x has been, sadly, shelved. The UI rework went nicely but working on the core engine had me finally accept the truth – that it is not within my current abilities to reduce the English language into a set of “if” statements. On top of that, I received a feature request for localization, and it hit me that ALPHA’s grammar analysis code was specifically for English and that inherently limited it.
New projects? I do have a prototype I’m quite excited about, but it has a long way to go and I have concerns about whether it will be able to garner widespread appeal and adoption due to its nature. We’ll see. I’m also spending time learning more technologies to hopefully build better apps in the future.
Kaffeine TV: I may have had a bit of a “whoopsie”.
“I promise I won’t vanish for another six months before I make the next episode,” he said, before vanishing for *checks notes* 15 months. That aged well. Well I did shoot the next episode within a month of posting “Koding with Kodular – Notes #2”, but my phone glitched out when saving the audio (I record my voice on my phone because my laptop mic is a potato and my headphone mic doesn’t work) so I was left with unusable footage. I’ll have to undo the changes made to the project and reshoot the episode in the future.
As for the content I’m planning for the future… That’s still quite volatile. There are many different things I wish to cover, but I’m not sure what’s the best way to go about it. The viewer retention is not great, so I wonder, is it the video length? The lacklustre editing? My voice? I do realize that I’m no pro YouTuber, and have a lot to learn, but I need lots of honest feedback to know what you all want to see on the channel. I’ve tried longer in-depth videos, shorter, faster videos… I intend to try out and learn better editing, maybe some basic effects without being too distracting, and some light background music to cut out the buzzing left behind by the noise cancellation after I delete the sound of my laptop fans.
Kaffeine… Community?: it exists
It seems I made a Discord server and forgot about it. Oh, well. Here you go: https://discord.gg/dBDfUQk
Turns out you need to share the link to get people to join! Who knew? I hope this server will make it easier for me to get feedback and interact with my audience / userbase.
You’re still reading? Awesome. So Kaffeine news aside… What about me personally? Glad you asked. I became a moderator on the Kodular Community just a couple days before I published “Koding with Kodular – Notes #2”, I finished high school and turned 18, and am now about to go to college. And then there’s other personal occurrences. On top of all this, there was for a long time a depressing lack of any motivation or hope for the future, brought upon by prolonged isolation among other factors.
Does that sound like a lot? Sure feels like a lot. I’m in a better place mentally, now. I feel productive again, even if I still have some ways to go before I can safely say that I’m being productive. Best of all, I look at tomorrow and see hope again. I see stuff I want to do, to share, to learn.
Thank you all for supporting me, and I hope to get back to creating stuff sooner rather than later. If you want to chat / hangout / discuss anything, here’s the Discord server link again: https://discord.gg/dBDfUQk
I’ll be back with more soon-ish. Until then, happy coding. ☕