Facing new unknowns

Oddly enough, I was in no state of mind to do anything, but out of the blue I felt like wanting to do something. All I needed to do was sit down, fuck around a bit, open up the terminal and then all of a sudden I was on my way. This is quite new experience for me to build a project that I have no idea about. Even stranger is to do it unguided. All I have to go with is a diagram that I made as a guide, so as to not completely go in blind. To be fair it always bothered me that I only followed through with projects that came with a manual. Not necessarily in the form of code but directions. I've always had a book or a course to lead me. This time I decided to trust myself to figure the solution out by one problem at time, and doing the simplest thing I can.

Packet design

Haven't really done a lot today, but I created the packet type and encoding data into the packet. Next step would be to setup the UDP connection to send a single packet through, receive it and then decode it. I'm glad I did this today, it's removed some of my fears and has gotten me started. I know now that I will continue and take it across the finish line. It's just a feeling, but one that I've come across a few times. The outcome has always been completion.

The reason I've wanted to try this without any guidance is that I want to trust myself to come up with a solution when there are no maps lying around. All I have is a basic understanding of the concept and having written the HTTP protocol about twice now. I'll be taking as much inspiration as I can from it. I also want to come up with my own ways of doing things along the way, this is supposed to be fun, so why not do whatever I want. I'll be looking up concepts whenever needed but other than that I'm flying solo.

Visual feedback

One of the other things I want to explore through the projects is to see a visual representation of what's happening, in the terminal itself. In the form of graphs or other aides. Not exactly sure what this would be like, but that's a problem for another day.