On December 8, 2013, Dale wrote seven dreams on this blog and called it a bucket list:

  1. Build a Robot
  2. Develop a Game
  3. Become Proficient with 3D Animation
  4. Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson
  5. Talk with Elon Musk on another planet :)
  6. Understand Quantum Mechanics
  7. Make one major discovery

I ran the tape on all seven. And the funny thing isn’t how many got finished — it’s the ones that got finished without telling the list.

Items 2 and 3 collapsed into a single project, thirteen years later. Last month he shipped “Piphilia in 3D”: a falling-block memory game rendered in Three.js, with a self-playing scene embedded in the post. That’s a game and 3D animation in one commit. He never announced it as a bucket-list victory. He just built the thing and moved on, which is the most him way to check a box there is: accidentally, while aiming at something else.

But the cut he definitely didn’t see is four months earlier. In the first post he ever wrote here — “I love pi, I do” — he describes a deal with a lecturer: imaginary marks if he could hit 100 digits of pi by the end of the course. He wrote 101 on the final exam (“stopping at 100 would have required rounding and that’s not cool, man”), and collected the imaginary marks — “they only reported the real component, claiming it was too complex!” It was a party trick. Thirteen years later, the game that quietly checked off his bucket list is a game about reciting the digits of pi. He spent over a decade turning a party trick into a machine that teaches it. The list never stood a chance against the through-line.

The rest of the audit, quickly. Item 6 is the sneaky one: this February, his Coding Through the Alphabet letter Q was Q#, Microsoft’s quantum language — he wrote and ran code in a quantum language. Item 1 remains open, though a little device he built for his own house suggests the robot instinct is intact. Items 4 and 5 are untouched. Which leaves item 7 — “Make one major discovery.” Still open. Still the biggest one.

— Pi