Vim, Node.js, and Text Adventures, oh my!

The day job and all of the side projects have been keeping me pretty busy lately and I need a mental break. How do I take mental breaks? Easy. By playing with toys I don’t get to play with often enough. This weekend, between all of the other things that have been keeping me busy, I’m going to try to focus my spare time on a few things:

1. Learn to Love VIM
   I have seen people talk about vi and vim as being the best IDE in the world for developers, but having used it for many years on a monochrome monitor back when I didn’t really know what I was doing, I have been reluctant to attempt it now that I’ve seen and used everything else under the sun, from open source to commercial. The few times I’ve tried have been met with disaster as I find myself in unlimited settings hell, and I spend more time tweaking it than actually coding in it; however, I have a serious problem to solve. I NEED a powerful, efficient, and cross-platform IDE that will work for at least the most used languages/frameworks on my list of ever-growing interests. Thus far, Eclipse has been my go to IDE for anything not Microsoft, and VS 2010 for .NET (and recently, I’ve been messing with Python in it as well). Put they both have quirks that bother me, and I just need something that works for everything and allows me to tailor it to my needs… it really is time for a change.
2. Dive into Node.js and Friends
   I’ve messed with Node.js a few times in the past couple years and have seen its use for asynchronous, event-driven coding, but I haven’t really had a chance to dig into the details and learn it from the inside out. I figure since I already know and use Javascript on a daily basis, know enough about Node.js to actually start working with it to build a project, and have some upcoming projects I’d like to use it on, now would be a perfect time to start really getting my hands dirty with it. I also have a few libraries/tools already picked out that I am hoping to deep dive into as well: Express, Backbone, Underscore, Mongoose, MongoDB, CoffeeScript, and whatever else that helps me get the job done, which brings me to…
3. Build a Web-based Text Adventure Engine
   I just realized that I never finished that Turbo Pascal-based text adventure game engine I was building back in middle school. While I don’t have any of my original code (thankfully), I do have an extreme desire to finish what I started and to learn some stuff in the process. I’ve come a long way since then, so I’m looking forward to having a whole new world of problems to solve that weren’t even possibilities in my mind back then. Maybe I’ll make it multiplayer too, like a web-based MUD. And maybe I’ll open source it. And maybe I’ll run it as a service that others can use to build their own game worlds. And maybe I’ll integrate it with Facebook and Twitter since that it the in thing to do. And maybe I’m getting ahead of myself a bit.

Anyways, we’ll see where it goes, if anywhere at all. There’s always so much work to be done elsewhere…