I've been in the industry for 7 years, primarily at Intel working on SSD validation. My primary focus in that time was Python work and some C for more performance-focused parts of our codebase.
Outside of my professional life, I spend a lot of time exploring various technologies around web and game development. Recently, this has centered around Next.JS and Godot.
While most of my experience is in internal tooling and testing, I'm open to anything that comes with interesting problems to solve. I'm a fast learner and mostly agnostic to the stack.
This and 'The Games That Weren't' [1] are my favorite coffee table books. Like another commenter, I tend to just open to a random page and it's always a great tidbit of learning about gaming's history.
5+ years in the industry so far. My primary focus in that time was Python work and some C for more performance-focused parts of our codebase. Outside of my professional life, I spend a lot of time exploring various technologies around web and game development, working on smaller website and game ideas.
While most of my experience is in internal tooling and testing, I'm open to anything that comes with interesting problems to solve. I consider myself a fast learner and having a puzzle of sorts in front of me absolutely helps drive that.
5+ years in the industry so far. My primary focus in that time was Python work and some C for more performance-focused parts of our codebase. Outside of my professional life, I spend a lot of time exploring various technologies around web and game development, working on websites and games that spring into my head.
While most of my experience is in internal tooling and testing, I'm open to anything that comes with interesting problems to solve. I consider myself a fast learner and having a puzzle of sorts in front of me absolutely helps drive that.
"Yumi and the Nightmare Painter" and "Tress of the Emerald Sea" - Two of Brandon Sanderson's "secret projects" that he released this year and easily my favorites of the bunch. Tress is just such a fun adventure and Yumi left me an emotional wreck by the end.
"There Is No Antimemetics Division" - I had a brief period where I wanted to read some stories about clandestine operations around odd anomalies, SCP-adjacent if you will. This, alongside "Agents of Dreamland", is rather short and great for getting through in a couple sittings. It's all about taking on an entity that you actively can't remember the existence of.
Non-Fiction:
"Letters to a Young Poet" - This is a collection of ten letters sent from the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to a younger aspiring poet in the early 1900s. As a creative that sometimes struggles with the whole "what am I doing this for?", I found this a highly inspiring and comforting read.
"On Writing" - I'm sure most of you know the book, or at the least know Stephen King. The info in here on writing (at least in the style of King) is fantastic, but I think the memoir portions are the killer part of this book. The man certainly has a storied past, for better or worse.
+1 for Yumi and Tress. You don’t have to be deep into the rest of his books to appreciate them. (Unlike Sunlit Man) The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England was a total hoot—if you want something light and silly, go for that.
I was introduced to Calvino this year and picked up Invisible Cities for the first. It was amazing how evocative the descriptions were. If On A Winter's Night is a great place to go next, but I don't think you can go wrong with any of them.
Agreed. Once a file/page reaches a certain size, I find minimaps to be a mostly unintelligible blob. Maybe it'd be solved by just making it bigger, but then we push into the problems of screen real estate and what not.
I think, it's also, instead of just approximating the position in the document, we now feel compelled to translate our mental image to a visual one and to match this with the rendering in the minimap. Which introduces an additional step of dis-abstraction, and what is essentially abstract (text) now has to be treated like a material object, as well. Moreover, if the overall structure isn't as varied as it may be the case with code, it doesn't provide much significance, anyways.
(It may depend on where you're located on the aphantasia to photographic memory continuum, though. I'm definitely closer to the former than to the latter extreme.)
I'm sure it's negligible these days, but there's also the concern of an increased graphics load since you'll have to do an extra pass for the transparency. But I don't want to dive too far into the mindset of "everything must be optimized to the max".
Computers are very fast. GPUs are way faster than you think. Of course, it doesn't feel like that way since all the abstractions and layers kill performance by a thousand cuts.
Remember, "Aero" was a thing almost 20 years ago and that was a graphically intensive window renderer at that time. Nowadays we could have 50x better effects without a problem but UI designers are not willing to.
Oh for sure, I'm with you. Old graphics work has this mindset of avoiding transparency passes stuck in my head. Certainly a small part of the bigger problem.
My 0.3GHz iMac in 1996 could draw and resize window drop shadows at 60fps while simultaneously encoding an MP3 without a hitch. It’s seriously inexpensive computationally.
Sorry, it was 1998. I’m pretty sure Mac OS 8 had drop shadows but even if it didn’t, I took that machine all the way to 10.4 and every version of OS X had drop shadows.
Classic Mac OS drop shadows were opaque, hence a lot cheaper.
I don't think OS X is a good example of your point because resizing windows was incredibly sluggish for a long time. I always figured it was somehow due to the combination of live resizing plus ubiquitous compositing, but I never understood why it was so slow.
Resizing is slow because it is a back-and-force between the compositor (insanely fast, no bottleneck here) and a given user application, which receives a resize event multiple times a second, has to relayout its UI (CPU-bound - OS X might have had a phase when it had to run a constraint solver), and then rerender every widget in the new size. Shadows don’t matter here at all.
There were live resizing hacks on classic MacOS that often worked pretty well, depending on the app. So it seemed pretty shocking to me how huge the regression was in the early days of OS X.
I don’t think the graphics hardware was always “insanely fast” back in those days, but even so, there must have been some terrible bottlenecks in the software.
As a user there was no way around it, and if I recall right, even as a developer it was hard to get decent resizing performance out of the system widgets.
One of the very few times I can recall where Apple has shipped something with such poor performance. Maybe most people didn’t notice or didn’t care because they just don’t resize windows very often?
Precisely my thoughts. The fact that this exists is so cool, but it's clear some more tuning would have to be done for "proper" balance.
'Subterranean Crush' is exactly 'Flesh to Dust' but two mana cheaper and 'Silent Splendor' is 'Dramatic Reversal' cranked to 11. An instant include in any blue deck, I need it.
The hardest part of the hardware experience for me so far has been the waiting. I recently took the next step in being a keyboard nerd and have been tinkering with custom macro pads.
Currently printing the bottom of a custom osu! pad for the third time after a couple goofs.
Absolutely a blast though, especially coming from doing purely software. Even if you're just doing prototypes, highly recommended.
Remote: Yes
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Technologies:
- Professional: Python, Gitlab, Jenkins, CI/CD & general DevOps work, C#, C++
- Hobbyist: React, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, MongoDB, MySQL, Unity
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Relay Email: [email protected]
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I've been in the industry for 7 years, primarily at Intel working on SSD validation. My primary focus in that time was Python work and some C for more performance-focused parts of our codebase.
Outside of my professional life, I spend a lot of time exploring various technologies around web and game development. Recently, this has centered around Next.JS and Godot.
While most of my experience is in internal tooling and testing, I'm open to anything that comes with interesting problems to solve. I'm a fast learner and mostly agnostic to the stack.