My final submission for the IIBA 2022 Awards. But first, lemme tell you a story..

No, not every day was that sunny and that amazing. But that afternoon, it absolutely was.

Methods and morals (how and why)

On March of 2022, while the world is going even crazier than it has been for the past years, I decided to bring home (my 🇬🇧 one) my lovely new Benelli Leoncino Trail motorbike, which I had bought in Italy for a number of reasons(1). One the tiny detail though is that between my UK home and my Italian home there's almost 2k kms..

An Extract of the Principia Mathematica, a colossal work by Whitehead and Russell, dedicated to formally proving that 1+1=2. If these guys dedicated a good chunk of their life to prove that 1+1=2, we can dedicate a few hours of our time to prove (test) that our code behaves as intended

If there was something that I really missed since I moved to the UK, that was wild nature. The smell of grass in the morning, or a sunset without light pollution, or the silence of a forest. These kinds of things can't really be appreciated if your main focus is just to get on with your day to day job, and reach the end of the week without stressing too much.

Note: this article is subject to be updated as soon as I find a framework that meets my criteria! If you find anything that can be proved to be incorrect, please let me know so I can address it.

What I am looking for?

A shell friendly, text-editor agnostic framework for creating visuals that is fun and has good enough performance. Hot-reloading would be great. An interpreted language wins over compiled ones: even if it's less performant, no compilation step means it's actually easier to stay in the zone and make something creative and interesting.

I've been recently nerd-sniped by a geek friend about fish-shell (and that really says it all about what kind of person I am).

Anyways.. I've been a zsh and oh-my-zsh user for a long time now, way before zsh was promoted as the default shell on macOS. It's been a fun ride, full of autocompletions, fancy themes and quick history browsing. I quite enjoyed it, especially compared to the "duller" bash. But since I'm always up for trying out something new and living my digital life on the edge, I decided to give it a try for a while.. especially considering that at work I'm forced to use tcsh.

This brief post is a recap of my experience after playing around with fish for a few weeks.

Autocompletion

The main "selling point" of fish is that it's dev friendly and provides an interactive autocompletion experience. It's hard to describe exactly how it feels while typing, that's something you have to try to get familiar to.. here's a quick gif to give you a hint:

Time for reading: 15 minutes

Who am I?

For those who are not from the VFX industry, a Pipeline TD is a poor fellow that was too technical to be a VFX artist but didn't feel pursuing the good, cozy warm life of a software developer. He's basically a dev who likes movies more than startups, and should seriously reconsider his/her life choices.

In the last 2 weekends, I spent a bit of time revamping the backbone of this website since I felt I needed to have more control over it, not just on the presentation layer, but also on the architecture (while I was there, I did also add a sprinkle of darkness to the CSS but that's not what I want to focus on in this post).

To those who aren't in the UE loop it might seem weird, but yes! UE4 has been offering a Python API for a while now (iirc, since end of 2019).

It also ships with a shiny Python3.7 interpreter, as recommended by the vfxplatform.

Its main purpose is to offer a way to integrate Unreal into existing workflows, and automate the heck out of it! This means that it's definitely NOT meant to be used for anything "in game". That would be crazy, performance-wise.