Hello everybody, for this past week I met with my team to work on our overarching project plan. The project we are working for is the A-Life project which is to create artificial lifeforms that evolve and change as they interact with other lifeforms and environment variables. With my design background I offered to do work on the gui which I will be creating using Pyqt5 which is a pretty easy to pick up python library that also comes with a nifty designer as well as tools to convert the UI file directly to a .py file for when adding functionality is needed. How I plan to approach my work is to create a main menu ui/pause menu ui that pulls up the grid for our project. How this will pull up the pygame library window I am not sure of yet but I will be discussing more with my teammates moving forward, as all it should be is just rigging one of the buttons to pull up the game or display window. So far I have been refreshing my memory on pyqt5 which has taken some time to remember what the calls and functions are for specific types of buttons and windows but I’m about 98% there in terms of being back to where I was the last time I used it.

As for what else is going on in my life, I have been working as a consultant/analyst managing email automations for a large company in the US. The work so far was pretty simple and consistent, however I am currently pulling up some slack for contact at the client company that recently quit. While this has been a bit stressful I am optimistic that I will learn a lot from this experience both in managing clients as well as the requests that I deal with on a day to day basis that will give me more familiarity with SQL and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. All the while I have been working on a painting that I was finally able to finish today after chipping away at it for two weeks or so.

I call it “Charon Rouge” as it is a mythological reference to the ferryman of the underworld that I thought would be cool in a Bayou setting :

I find that painting helps me to manage stress effectively and it creates a beautiful result (most of the time). Taking small breaks in between big stretches of work to put a few strokes down definitely helps me become more centered and focused for the next task at hand. This following week I am planning to have the menu in a less than polished but functional form ready for the rest of the group in the repository.