 Hey everybody, Happy New Year! It is New Year's Eve 2017. We are a few short hours away from 2018. I'm already seeing like CNN news in Korea and stuff like that, you know fireworks and all that stuff. So I just wanted to wish everybody happy new year. If you've followed my channel for quite a while, you know that every year I kind of make a video blog. I know I'm more centered around tutorials, but once a year I make a video blog and I kind of talk about my year from a very high level just so I can sit back and go wow what a crazy year or what a hot, painful, happy, sad whatever year. And then I talk about what I'm going to be doing this coming year. So without further ado in 2017 I found someone very close to me. She's actually in the other room taking a shower right now so I'm trying not to talk too loud. But it's one of those relationships where you just can't imagine what it's like without that person and it kind of blows me away. I never thought I would find something like that ever. And I'm fairly certain she feels the same way so it makes it even better. So without getting all sappy if you've found one of those you know exactly what I'm talking about. Also work, speaking of love, work and I have a love-hate relationship. Work has a two-year probationary period and I just finished my second year on the job so I am now out of probation. Oh man this job is busy. It keeps me very occupied. I probably work a lot more than I should which is why everything else like tutorials have slowed way down because I'm doing a lot of work. Point in case my work phone is like literally right in front of me in its New Year's Eve. But finding that work-life balance has been a real challenge for me. A close friend of mine actually moved to Chicago which is three hours away so it's like I've been doing a lot more work and just not hanging out with friends and stuff so I think I need to actually find that balance a little better. Point in case on that I did something else I thought I would never do again. I bought a house. I moved out of that apartment and I moved into a nice four-bedroom house not that I need four bedrooms and it's been a challenge just sitting there fixing things constantly you know getting back and like doing yard work and mowing and snow blowing has been just oh yeah to maintain my sanity with all of the above. I've gotten back into video games and you know being 43 years old and growing up on things like Pac-Man and Pong it's just amazing to see how video games have evolved. The woman that I'm in love with got me a PlayStation 4 for Christmas which blew me out of the water. If you're listening to this you had a $3 limit and you're in trouble but that PlayStation is amazing and I'm playing a game called What is it? Horizon New Dawn? It's kind of like a techno Skyrim. Oh my gosh the graphics on that. It's like watching a movie. I'm just stunned at just watching it. So on to what I will be doing. Void Realms. I think it's time. I think this is the year that this front page will go away. If you're wondering why this front page is why it is I used to run a company called HTML Helper and if you go to html-helper.com you'll see that it goes to this coffee cup software which is why this page is here. They actually bought out my website and all my source code and everything and I had to sign a non-compete agreement meaning I would not make another web page editor and I think their code base has evolved quite a bit. I don't think they actually run any more of my code but their code used to be on mine. Anyways I'm the type of person that just can't sit still so I started just cranking out programs and tons of them. This list used to be bigger and the web host that I was on died. They just they promised me it was actually in their agreement that they have redundant backups. They use the what was it the grandfather father son system of tape rotation so if one tape died the other tape would backfill it through voodoo magic and all that other stuff but yet none of that happened. The web server which at the time was a physical box because this was before virtualization technology really took hold. The physical box actually died and thus all the source code died with it and so I contacted them and they said well don't you have backups and I said no that's what I'm paying you guys in arm and a leg for and they said nope you are responsible for your own backups. I'm like it's right in the agreement and we just went back and forth so I went to a much cheaper web host and I made sure to put this on my front page and I had to rebuild the website and everything because I mean literally everything was just gone. Shame on me for not having my own backups. I trusted them but I put this up and they threatened to sue me and that that was years and years ago but I just kind of kept this up just despite them. I said hey you know what I don't care I'll see you in court never happened but I think this is the year this needs to come down because I get a lot of questions about this and actually I might just redo the whole website. One final thing is the Voidrealms Facebook group has just exploded well beyond what I thought it would ever be. There's 1700 almost 1800 programmers in there and we talk about just everything. A lot of times if I can't find the answer out in like Google or Stack Overflow I just post a question in here literally I mean literally within minutes sometimes seconds I get an answer and I can't find it out in Google anywhere so it's just an amazing resource of people and a lot of these folks out here I've actually considered friends at this point so I'm really glad that I set it up like this. All I did was make the group and everybody else just kind of took over and it's just grown and it's just amazing so what will I be doing enough of that enough of what will I be doing in 2018? Well I'm going to be redoing this website at some point definitely be cranking out more tutorials. I moved all the code up to get up and I have holy crap 370 repositories I may need an intervention on the tutorials but I thought about revisiting the cute tutorials and just starting from scratch because I get a lot of questions about hey these tutorials are older and I'll cover that in a minute I actually have something that's going to be really awesome with cute but before I do that one thing I've been working on is the Society Quest Club it's a website. The website itself kind of sucks and I've kind of abandoned the idea it's me and my buddy Nick are doing this and Nick is kind of a sales guy and I'm the technical guy. We kind of wanted it like an online quest sort of system and we're not happy with the web platform so we're going to move it over to mobile so if you've been watching my video tutorials that's why a lot of them are mobile centric now because I'm learning mobile programming. I've kind of gone through Swift, Android Studio. I'm going through Flutter now. I want to go through vplay. I'm probably going to do this whole thing in Flutter. I don't know why. Flutter's just really caught my attention and there's a few other folks that are kind of depending on me to do the Flutter tutorials so Flutter's in alpha so I've gotten a lot of flag people are like what about native script what about react native what about zamara what about this what about that blah blah blah they're all really great tools now in my opinion Flutter blows all of them out of the water with the exception of maybe vplay. I say vplay because vplay lays on top of Qt and it adds a lot of the functionality that Qt is missing such as like Firebase integration, Facebook logins, things like that and I haven't had a whole lot of time to play with vplay. I kind of feel bad about that because I actually reached out to vplay and said do you mind if I did tutorials and they were really hyper about it and said please do when are you going to get them done and I've been just swamped with all of these other things especially the house has been really occupying my time so society quest club I'm probably going to build it in Flutter first just because Flutter's really got my attention and if I'm not happy then I'll revisit in vplay. Kind of the crux between the two if you're wondering the trade-off between the two is Flutter is free I mean you can make just amazing applications dirt free and not pay a dime where vplay actually costs money at some point you're going to have to pay money for vplay not saying it's not worth the money I'm just saying for a just kind of like a I don't want to say a throwaway application but you know just a side project I'm doing with a buddy of mine I don't want to have to pay money on top of it unless I have to now if the whole thing took off and became like a multi-million dollar company absolutely I would move towards something a little more robust than Flutter however Flutter is kind of awesome and it does a lot more than just mobile because it's built on Dart. Dart has a web you can do web pages you can do server side code you can do mobile code and I'm hoping they actually build like a desktop GUI similar to like how cute is so if you're a Flutter developer please build a desktop GUI I would love to be able to make desktop apps in Dart so I want to do a lot more Flutter tutorials I think I'm up to like 30 some odd tutorials and I want to start doing vplay tutorials vplay is vplay is a beast I mean it's an animal in itself it's got a lot of features and honestly I could probably make tutorials on vplay for years and years and years apps games plugins game network multiplayer I mean it has pretty much everything that cute itself is missing and they put a lot of work into this and honestly without diving into it becoming an expert in it I don't think I'd do it justice so I definitely want to dive into that this year so back to you my love and my passion I did promise you there's something big coming with cute I've gotten a lot of questions from folks especially just starting the tutorial saying hey you're in your intro to cute is really old will they still work and some of those don't work because the platforms change quite a bit so I'm thinking about revisiting those and it was really funny because I was literally sitting here thinking about just redoing the whole thing from scratch and I was actually contacted by cute.io and I can't really go into details because there really isn't any details but we're in the entry-level talks of possibly I have to say big bold letters possibly me doing a joint venture with them over you know me doing some video tutorials for them which my hope and this is 1000% peer speculation none of the details are hammered out they just contact me saying would you be interested we're kind of throwing the idea around but my hope is we could actually do something like go into their actual official documentation so like just say sensors cute sensors and then like there'd be like a little video and you click on that it would like you know go over how to use things how it works and then the actual writing of the code and things like that I think integrating all that with their documentation would be a monumental effort but at the same time would be just amazing so I'm kind of waiting to hear back from them on that regardless of what they say I'm still going to continue with my video tutorials and I may start from scratch this hits 6.0 I will more than likely start from scratch just because it's changed so much so definitely let me know your thoughts on all of this especially I'm curious to know what you guys think of like Flutter versus vPlay and versus just straight cute with QML and definitely let me know what you guys think about possibly cute.io and myself working together to do video tutorials I like I said zero details it was very very much in the infancy I'm very hesitant to even comment anymore simply because we don't have any details and things could change drastically they could come back tomorrow and say no thank you we're not interested I don't know but let me know what your thought on that let me know if potentially if it did happen how you guys would want to see it would you want to integrate it with their documentation would you want like another bullet point here this is video tutorials or something like that or would you want a completely separate website one of the things that we were kind of kicking around was actually doing kind of like because they have a cute certification is doing like a set of tutorials with sample code which leads into like a questions and answer kind of like a quiz sort of thing and then you get like points through this whole thing so by the time you get done with this you actually get like a actual certification which would be really awesome but like I said very much in its infancy just kicking ideas around well let me know what your ideas are cute for whatever reason with its diamonds and warts has become one of my favorite things to do so I'm definitely excited about that anyways I've talked enough I just wanted to wish everybody a happy new year and I hope that 2018 is an amazing year for you guys I'll talk to you later