It has been about 5 months now. Since I started making the change to pursue graphics programming. I have done a ton of work in that time. Between school and learning a new language and studying a whole lot of math. And in this time, I have decided why not start documenting my process. I see a whole lot of success stories that are always getting posted every day it seems like. And I feel like I want to share the before the success the actual grind of getting there. And to do this I plan on writing a post like this one about every week or two weeks depending on what got done that specific week. And just cover exactly what it was I worked on that specific week. Now I don’t want to just keep this to a technical blog post. Just covering the specific program, I worked on. I want to go into things such as how I have been scheduling my time between work school and getting my other goals. I then want to show the specific programs I may have built that week. Granted they may not be much at first but as time goes on I plan on creating bigger and better projects. But I figure each time I get something out the door and done. Its just more practice and more experience I didn’t have before.

So, with that out of the way let me get into what exactly it is I have started doing. To begin breaking into becoming a graphics programmer. So, the very first thing I began to do was buy a whole lot of resources. Because being a graphics programmer is such a wide term. And there is so much information to study and take in. As time goes on and I begin getting into the specifics of writing code for the graphics portion of things I will begin narrowing down my section within the field. But in the meantime, I wanted to get as much information as I could on the subject. Here you can see just some of the resources that I bought. https://www.instagram.com/p/BgzW64thWn5/?hl=en&taken-by=alexgwartney17 Now once I bought these books I started with the basics of the basics. That is learning c++. And gaining the math skills needed. I have been focusing a lot on the math as the code portion of it can come last. But I do try to get in as much coding in as I can. You can see some of my progress here. https://github.com/gwartney21 . Also if you are wanting to learn c++ I suggest getting c++ One Hour A Day. There are a few other books I have but I found this one explains things in a way that makes more sense. At least in my opinion.

Now outside of this I also have been working in java programming for class. Which has been nice for practice. And just a good skill to have in general. You again can see some of the stuff I have been working on in my GitHub. But I will cover more of these specific projects in a future post. So with all of this going on let me explain how I schedule my day. To start with I work a mix of swing and graveyard as a help desk tech. So half of the week up until Monday and Tuesday. I tend to get up around 10 or 7am. On Fridays, I take and begin working on getting ready for the week. Catching up on emails looking to see what must get done at work and school ect. I then take and begin trying to get through at least a few chapters of math a day. I do a tutor session as well with my brother. My goal has been to get a certain section of the math book done a week. As to cover as much as I can. I try to study at least until I go to work. After work, I tend to come home and just relax and play games before I got to bed at 2 am as I get off at 11:30 pm.

I then take and repeat this process up until Sunday. Where I will take and begin working on some of my homework for the coming week. And then spend a few hours on math before I head in. Now on Mondays and Tuesdays, this is where I tend to put some time in between finishing homework math and try to get some C++ programming in. Depending on the time I have in the day since I don’t have to go to work until later that night. Then on the weekends, I have made it a point to not do any work but just play games. So this way I get a mental break and can spend some time relaxing before I start the week again.
So overall I try to really split things in half throughout the week spending as much time as I can on each subject.

At first, I think the hardest thing was getting into a routine. But once I got into the swing of things being able to keep to a schedule became easy. I think the biggest thing I learned out of all of it was to schedule a time to relax. To avoid burn out and be able to keep on pushing forward. As I have a tremendous amount of stuff to learn. And none of this is going to be done overnight. And that’s about it as far as catching up. If you made it to the end of the post thank you for reading it through. And I look forward to sharing my journey as I go along.