Evidently I have a life

I have spring break coming up in about 2 weeks; while that would typically have me excited, I'm too distracted and drained for any unnecessary emotions. I've been in a rather odd slump the past few months with where I'm at.

In just the past two months or so, I've been working on projects that I'm actually quite proud of and will continue to maintain and work on:

• alezakos and I had been working to finally get BZiON 0.9.0 released on February 21st along with Leagues United—the new unified BZFlag league. This project finally sees the initial release after about 2 years and 6 months of development.
• bzElectron has reached version 0.1.1 with some minor new features and an awesome pull request from alezakos to support regular group files.
• At one of my current jobs, I started PhpPulse—a wrapper for the DaPulse API. The wrapper has finally reached it's initial release after a few alpha releases and has received a description of "awesomeness" by DaPulse' Twitter account.
• I have also started stakx (my own static website generator), just like Jekyll, but mine's written in PHP and uses Twig—a far more powerful alternative to Liquid. I intend on using this at my current job to start building more powerful static websites, if that makes sense. There's a lot more to come regarding this project.

I am really proud about my achievements above, but that hasn't been enough for me to feel satisfied or content.

As much as I care about these projects, they simply aren't very significant to anyone else except myself and a handful of people. While I'm ecstatic about the fact that a handful of people use it, I'm saddened that I haven't been able to join or contribute to a larger community or project.

I have always taken objection to school and its practices, but that's a rant for another day. I'm taking 6 classes this semester and I'm only enjoying 2 of those classes—a Linux class and a GIS class; I've learned an incredible amount in those classes and am very happy about taking those professors. The downside? Very little of the knowledge that I've picked up is applicable to either of my current jobs or have been things that I'm already familiar with.

The worst feeling that I've been having lately, and has probably contributed to my current mood, is having a lot go over my head and not being able to learn it quickly as I have with pretty much everything else. The fact that I am having to learn a lot of these new things in an environment with deadlines is far from ideal. In addition, there are a lot of people I admire and respect who have been able to learn these concepts or tools very easily. Of course, everyone always tells me not to compare myself to others but it's hard not to, sometimes.

Anyhow, I didn't mean for this become a rant like other blog posts I've written so I'm very excited to get an early version of Stakx built and distributed to a few people to have them give it a shot to compare it to Jekyll or Sculpin.