Whew!

It was close, by my standards, but I managed to get my CCSF submission in on time. Obviously talking about it here would be Spoilers, even though I am pretty sure the only people who read this are the people who helped me test the agent anyways.

It’s going to get a release first and foremost on the official CCSF 2020 tumblr, and I’ll be making a post on my main blog about it afterwards, so watch those spaces! It's nothing too exciting but it was a fun little project and certainly accomplished its goal of helping me test the bashject script and figure out my workflow a little better.

Mostly what I figured out my workflow, though, is that setting things up is a little bit of a pain. I have to have jEdit open for the actual cosfile editing, and then a terminal window for the debug monitor, a terminal for the ject-ing of the cosfiles, a terminal for the external CAOS command line, a notepad file for keeping track of what I’m doing, and of course, the engine. Not to mention whatever I need for image-editing and edos/monk for processing all that stuff. It’s a fair bit of mental effort to sit down and open up all those things every time I want to continue a project.

I’m weighing my options because I’m not super sure how much time I want to sink into improving that workflow vs Actually Making Stuff, but I feel like I want to poke around with it at least a little.

One thing I want to investigate is the idea of developing jEdit plugins. I already have a little Java experience from working on Puppeteer, so it might not be terribly difficult. Even if I could just add buttons for injecting install/event/remove scripts, it’ll make my life so much easier. A built-in debug monitor would be a double-plus, as would a CAOS command line, but that would take more effort. Additionally, Monk has just enough command-line functionality that I might be able to include an instant “compile cos to agent” button, which would be super nice.

But again, I need to balance my time, because I have so little of it these days, and it’s so easy to get caught up in streamlining my workflow and then never actually working on anything. But at the same time, I want to spend time on what’s actually interesting to me in the moment, even if that’s just the joy of the endless rabbit hole of optimization. Slogging through tedious stuff I’m not enjoying in pursuit of the highest level of productivity is for my day job, and I’m not bringing that attitude into my hobby projects, even if it would result in more content.

So I guess I’ll investigate the available possibilities until I get tired, and then switch to actually working on things. We’ll see what happens!