"I probably had my personal "moment of truth" around the beginning of Doom 3's development, when it became clear that it is no longer possible to deeply underst

"I probably had my personal "moment of truth" around the beginning of Doom 3's development, when it became clear that it is no longer possible to deeply understand every single part of a modern application. There is just too much. Nevertheless, I found that I could still enjoy my work when confined to a subset of the entire project, and I have thus remained committed to the high end. However, the appeal of smaller systems still lingers." [0] I am very much having this moment with the current state of web/app development. Being a generalist, you end up primarily working to meet a product end, be it new user features or product milestones. All the time making many compromises along the way, as any good engineer should. Yet the depth of the web/mobile stack, the sprawl of libraries, and the abundance of computation for most tasks makes you operate at a very high level (30,000 ft) and only dive down to the bits when absolutely necessary. This has its own joys, primarily one of productivity, but it does starve a primordial part of most developers' brains that craves order/perfection/optimality/complete understanding. I never understood why some people would play with a low level language like C or assembly outside of work in their free times. After 10 years of professional application coding, I get it. [0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-archive/master/by_year/johnc_plan_2007.txt https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ESWAT/john-carmack-plan-ar...