I took the last few months off doing development at home, spent some time with family and friends and taking a break from development at home.  I find that I get burnt out programming all day then spending a large part of home time programming as well.  It’s not that I don’t love programming and learning but I personally need that good work/life balance to stay sharp.

In the meantime however I’ve finished the Witcher 3, I had it in my backlog for a long time but didn’t want to start playing it because I knew it would be a significant time investment and not really something you can pick away at without forgetting story-lines, characters or the myriad of controls required to be any good at the game.  I finally finished Witcher 3 and all the DLC which clocked in around 125 hours which was good value if you’re talking cost/vs time spent playing.  I enjoyed the game a lot, it feels like it’s been a really long time since I’ve played a good RPG, I’ve started others but abandoned them due to either boring combat, silly storylines or some other game coming along that caught my fancy.  I had tried previous games in the Witcher series however the combat in there just felt dull so I never did get very far however Witcher 3 is significantly better from an action point of view and the storylines were really memorable so it’s worth your effort if you’re considering it.

I also got invited to the XCloud beta Microsoft is putting on.  Overall I’m pretty impressed, I can’t help think that much of companies cloud offerings have been a lot of hot wind (Looking at your Stadia) however XCloud has been really stable and really easy to use.  If Microsoft packages XCloud as part of Gamepass they will have a winner in my mind.  It’s biggest downfall is bandwidth used.  Playing for around 45 mins used 1.6gb of data (when I was on WIFI) which is pretty crazy.  You’re not going to be using XCloud when you’re on mobile anytime soon, certainly not with how overpriced mobile data is here in Canada.

I also starting doing courses on Angular .  Last year I spent quite a bit of time learning Thymeleaf and Bootstrap as well as familiarizing myself with javascript so I thought it would be interesting to approach web development from a different angle (see what I did there) and since Angular is well recognized it felt like a good topic to learn on.  I’m still very early into my research but thus far I’m excited.  I like how typescript has a lot more type-safety than regular javascript however I find it’s still pretty easy to chop your feet off in Angular and get into a state where understanding where your bug is pretty difficult.  It’s pretty easy to mistype something or poorly name a field or method and have the code break without a lot of feedback why it isn’t working.  Much of that I’m sure is related to my inexperience however.  We’ll see as I get further into my online course if I am off base and being too critical of the tool after being spoiled by using eclipse/intelliJ for so long where I’m very familiar with finding and fixing bugs.