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---
title: "End of Summer Update"
date: 2019-09-19T20:40:26-05:00
---
Before the fall is officially here, I want to send an update on some stuff that I've been up to. In August, I participated in my first ever game jam. It was also my first real game that I made, other than some small arcade-ish games. The game is called Cosmic Cargo, made over a week with a team of (mainly) 2 developers, 1 sound artists, and some others helping with testing. The game is based on Oregon Trail, but in space. You can check it out [here](https://seafarerscafe.itch.io/cosmic-cargo). I had a lot of fun making the game and I want to participate in more jams in the future. I also recently moved and started my PhD in computer science. It has been great so far, but also very stressful adapting to a new environment. The CS department here alone has more students than the total at my last school. I created my own budgeting app, which is just a glorified literal spreadsheet. I wanted an easily enter purchases I made into a spreadsheet, but my problem was that editing a sheet on a phone is not fun. So I made a short app that takes the data I want as simple inputs, allowing it to do some data validation and automatically input things like the date. The app then can use the share function to send an email with the content I entered to my gmail account. Emails sent from this app are parsed using google scripting into a spreadsheet. Ideally, I would not need to go through google to do this, but the process works well. The email traces also are a sort of backup too. Eventually, I want to easily add a photo of a receipt too in the app, but my first attempts at doing this were not so easy. Hopefully, some of you received this blog update through email. I have been meaning to set up a newsletter infrastructure with this website and more regularly update it as well. For now, I'll alert the email list that there is a new post at least. If you wish to be added to this, you can sign up [here](http://marks.kitchen/email)
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