Towards a graphics stack for personal software

This past winter, I spent a couple months building something from scratch in C. Since it was around the holidays, I had the time to build out the more tedious pieces: immediate-mode rendering using SDL, a C implementation of my item store, and an interpreter to enable live-coding view definitions in its user environment with a language purpose-designed for the task.

I was working on this from the desert, which has a certain resonance with coding in C. The desert has an understated energy in its quietude. It was a distinct experience to be in some far-flung places, quietly sitting among the Saguaro, writing in lower-level languages to bring a new kind of personal computing environment to life. The work can be slow, but it seems exact in a way that contrasts to working with lots of dependencies which shift and buckle underneath you. I miss this kind of coding; it’s a more potent mix of the meaningful challenge in the work.