a1studmuffin

Horizon Zero Mean Girls

This has been the weirdest console generation. I’m still surprised they railroaded ahead with the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches right at the beginning of the pandemic.

It’s the same for people who don’t understand basic electronics or mechanics. Any problem just becomes “it’s broken” and the only solution is to take it to an expert and pay for their time, or toss it and buy a new one. It’s expensive to be ignorant.

What I love most about 8-bit era games are how small they were storage-wise. Most of the ROMs are tens of kilobytes for the entire game. Developers were severely constrained by the hardware limits which led to some creative decisions, eg. the bushes and clouds in Super Mario Bros are the same sprite just drawn in different colors. All code was written in pure assembly for efficiency and size.

To put it into perspective, AAA games today are one million times bigger.

… until you finally track down who wrote this mess, and it was you 5 years ago.

Haha, love the last paragraph. It’s hard for software engineers to release code publicly knowing their work is going to be scrutinized by other engineers, without adding a disclaimer or caveat of some kind.

“We had very little time and were crunching for months”

“I know this is a bit hacky but I was 7 years old”

“I wrote this code in hospital while I was recovering from anesthesia”

It reminds me of a musician playing their song publicly for the first time.

If you enjoyed Twisted Metal, you will enjoy Fallout. Both are excellent TV adaptations of their respective games, and have a thick layer of dark humour underpinning the action. Twisted Metal was particularly surprising, I want to shake the hand of whoever was looking at that crusty old PS2 game and saw dollar signs for TV!

Once you’re in the industry and see the typical shitshow that goes on in most companies and teams, you won’t think twice about not hearing anything for 3 months. There’s a million reasons why you won’t get a job or not hear back for a really long time that have nothing to do with you. Stick with it, times are tough right now but your luck will eventually change.

I like to remind juniors that you can only become an expert on something temporarily, especially on large teams/projects. Between skill atrophy and the foundations shifting beneath your feet as other developers continue working, it’s not possible to truly understand a complex system in a state of flux for very long.

A programmer sitting in front of a text-based IDE with millions of keyboard shortcuts at their disposal has to be the least necessary use case for a voice assistant I’ve ever heard of.

I discovered this very quickly after breaking a finger. One-finger typing didn’t slow me down at all. Turns out my brain was the bottleneck.

Even well-intended messages can be suffocating. All it takes is an explosion in popularity due to circumstances outside your control (like we’re seeing here), and suddenly you’re inundated with GitHub issues, PRs, conversations, important decisions, critical incidents that need a response and so on. Even if you’re full-time on it and salaried (which most open source devs aren’t), you simply can’t keep up with the volume - dozens, hundreds or thousands of other contributors trying to contact you, debating every aspect of your decisions, technical and social. The toll on mental health can be significant, especially to those personalities who like to stay organised and on top of things.