Jotunn Development: A Journey of Love and Labor
Early into 2017 I was for lack of better words shit out of luck. Having just been removed from my position at the United States Post Office due to medical reasons life was entering a downward spiral. Anxiety and depression making stemming from an inability to pay bills and in general provide for my wife and even the dogs was beginning to get the best of me. After a months of putting in job applications I was yet to see any attention. Until one day I stumbled across AnIdiotsGuide as well as <Evie.Codes> on YouTube.
They were doing something I knew little about but that none the less dragged me in. I found myself infatuated with their guides on programming a discord bot. With my budding interest in coding I dove head first into the process, trying my best not to simply copy and paste but understand the concepts. My earliest creation was little more then a barely functional disaster. I had no vision aside from just the need to do something… anything to take my mind of the daily deluge of disappointment.
Little by little I gained confidence in what I was doing. A vision for what I wanted to create was beginning to take shape. My ambitions far out weighed my technical knowledge. Shortly later I had Artio (you’ll see a theme here soon) a bot based on the Commando framework for discord.js. It wasn’t much more the a code equivalent of the old duck tape and WD40 analogy. Although to my surprise it garnered a small amount of attention. People were inviting as well as hosting my bot on their own. It was around this time I entered college for the second time taking up a major in Network Administration. I would of preferred programming at this point but money was tight and the GI Bill funds would be a god send.
Step forward two years and Artio had been promptly archived. My earlier mistakes were hampering my ability to continue to improve. During that time I had what I considered my greatest accomplishment to date. I was working on an CheapShark command and finally understood how to make my first API calls. From the ashes of Artio had grown Heimdallr, a fork of Hoshi by 1Computer1 (I was and am still too lazy to make my own starboard feature) built on his framework discord-akairo. My code is still absolute trash sometimes but as more knowledge is gained I continually go back and fix my past mistakes. At this time Heimdallr comfortably sits around 70+ servers and the users who have talked to me about the bot seem to be happy. What began as a side project has grown into an ever consuming past time chasing down that one last bug. To be honest I really wouldn’t have it any other way.
