Hello! I’m Rafik Rizik, and this blog is a document of my evolving journey as a programmer.
A bit of history and why I decided to make this blog.
I started my programming in 2009 as a 19 year old. I used Python and PyGame as a way to teach myself how to program and become a game developer. I found the process very exciting and enjoyable, writing programs as simply as possible to accomplish my goals. I went from game to game, project to project, teaching myself the basics of programming. I found the process and the overall medium of game development and programming to be very enjoyable.
After some years I went to university, graduated and began my professional career as a software developer. During this time I continued working on personal projects but my efforts shifted towards using existing engine solutions such as Unity and Unreal. After experiencing university, professional work and personal game development using existing solutions, I found the entirety of the software engineering world to be very unfulfilling. Something about continuously using other peoples tools, building on top of things that have already been done for me without truly understanding the underlying mechanisms, and using large programs like Unity and Unreal to make games felt entirely unfulfilling. I didn’t feel like I was a programmer anymore, just someone who had the skill to use other peoples work. The magic and joy I felt early on before university was gone and I didn’t understand why. I lost the passion for the profession and the craft and I began to question whether this was truly what I wanted to do with my life.
Around 2019 I found a programming series called “Handmade Hero”. It was thanks to this series and specifically its creator that revitalized my joy for programming, computers, and the software engineering world as a whole. I later joined the Handmade Network community, and began my journey towards becoming a better programmer. Ever since then I have been following the series and its teachings, investing many hours of my free time working towards improving my skills and craft as a software engineer, and finding fulfillment in that process.
This blog is a window into my transformation from a Python developer into a low level C/C++ software engineer with a deep interest for systems engineering, game engine programming, tooling and an overall fascination in how computers work.
