My python ray tracer for the Ray Tracer Challenge has just about caught up to where I was two years ago with my Haskell implementation. Look, I'm back to phong shading!

I am feeling much more confident and I am actually enjoying working through this book again. Now that this project is framed in a much better way in my mind, I find myself looking forward to working on it. This is a long way from the dread I felt the few times I tried to pick it up again last year.

I also did a little cleanup of the code which was enjoyable, removing unneeded static methods. The whole import tree is still needlessly complex and some files export the demo functions for other functionality in order to prevent circular imports. These should probably be broken out into their own files, but it doesn't matter for now

Wow, Day 30! I am honestly surprised that I did this, and even more surprised that I enjoyed it overall. Some days were a total slog, which I think is evident from the writing (especially the one where I had to get myself out of bed at 11:30pm when I realized I forgot that day's post). Most surprising was the amount of days that writing these shorts posts seemed dreadful but turned into great (or at least fun to write) posts.

From a standstill, the idea of writing often seemed like a lot of boring work. But, once I got the ball rolling, I noticed I had a whole lot of ideas that I wanted to write about. This whole effort has had me reading, thinking, and daydreaming more. I still want to reduce the amount of content I consume, since this blog has illuminated just how much noise I have every day.

I am going to lax my constraint of writing here every day, but I absolutely want to keep this habit up in some way. Maybe a weekly goal works best, combined with a monthly goal for the main blog. Tentatively, I'll commit to 3 micro posts a week and 1 blog post a month. It'd probably be best to pick specific days and dates, but I'll save that for later. Maybe I'll bring back the daily writing with this year's Advent of Code.

This has been a great experience and I can definitely say now that I enjoy writing, at least in some capacity.