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It is so amazing how quickly he was able to resolve this tool. 2 weeks to build a very specialized tool AND perform the optimizations on the code. What am I doi

It is so amazing how quickly he was able to resolve this tool. 2 weeks to build a very specialized tool AND perform the optimizations on the code. What am I doing with my life?

angersock 10y ago
Statistically speaking--given the tech sector demographics--something on the web or using a managed language. I'm not saying that programmers are getting worse--actually wait, no, that's what I'm saying (myself included).
gravypod 10y ago
Two weeks in game dev is like a year in a standard industry. You work hard when your job is your hobby, passion, and profession.
papaver 10y ago
insomniac has been working on this kind of stuff for the last decade... the stuff they do is impressive, but don't think it just happened out of the blue...
meredydd 10y ago
On one hand: Yes, this is an extremely cool hack. Hats off. On the other hand: It probably seems particularly impressive because its building blocks don't happen to be in your skill set. A rule of thumb: Something is impressive in proportion to how many times you think "How did they do that?!". In this case, if you're not already familiar with disassembly, binary instrumentation, how caches work, etc, then every step along this way sounds magical. But to a low-level/systems programmer, this sort of thing is their bread and butter. So their reaction wouldn't be "OMG how did he even...?" - it's probably more like "Niiiiiiice". (If you are, eg, a web developer, you probably have an equivalently ridiculous level of background knowledge about the internals of 5+ levels of the web stack, and how each goes wrong. I have seen systems guys - people who would jump on this project in a heartbeat - take one look at modern web dev and flee with their head in their hands, asking "how do they know all that stuff?!")
- bronxbomber92 10y ago
  Heh, not the best example to make your point [in this context] because the presenter also manages a group that writes/maintains the companies web tools, which consists of 340,000 lines of Javascript and 500,000 lines of C++ server-side code.. :) https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspostmortem.pdf https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspos... My experience has been that people who are good at the bottom layers of the stack are good with the top layers of the stack, too. And if they're unfamiliar, they can ramp very up quickly.
  - meredydd 10y ago
    [Update - Holy Moses, that presentation is amazing! It's a perfect illustration of what happens when you don't have the background of experience that web devs do, and just throw a bunch of smart but inexperienced C++ devs at a huge Javascript project. They walked into every rake in that grass, and I get a distinct subtext of "holy crap, I would never have believed the tooling was this bad..."] My comment addresses the perception that "OMG programmers today know nothing; this is what a Real Man looks like". Someone learning web development has spent a lot of brain-space on learning a level of in-depth knowledge that also looks magical to someone who hadn't. As it happens, I too think that the things you learn lower down the stack tend to make you a better engineer, whereas what you learn higher up the stack is too often an unedifying schlep. High-level systems spend a lot of complexity solving problems created by the layer underneath. (This goes 10x for web frameworks.) Low-level systems are more tightly constrained by the boundaries of the possible, so they spend their complexity on more fundamental problems. The same amount of time and intelligence spent learning the ins and outs of Angular yields less transferable skills than learning how compilers work. But if you need to build a web startup, compiler expertise on its own won't help you. It's like learning physics vs biology. Sure, physics is more fundamental, and a physicist learning biology usually has an easier time than the other way round. But a research biologist has also spent their time acquiring an immense amount of expertise, and fundamentally we need medical advances more directly than we need confirmation of the Higgs boson.
midnightclubbed 10y ago
Unless I'm missing something he got approval for 2 weeks to dig in ... doesn't say how long the entire project took (typically something like this would be a part-time task while working on immediate team/game needs). Fantastic work though and wonderful that insomniac have open sourced it.
xsmasher 10y ago
It may have been months of thinking and two weeks of coding. Once the stars align things can happen very quickly!
i336_ 10y ago
It would be so awesome if we could simply springboard off the "wow, this is amazing..." factor of highly novel ideas we've never heard of before and leverage our awe to soak in new things at superspeed. Instead, we get overwhelmed and demotivated and think "I could never learn that" - which only serves to send is spiralling in the opposite direction! Completely serious question/request: I'd be hugely interested in psychology hacks/ideas that short-circuit the brain (safely) to remedy this "thinking anti-pattern". I think self-worth and confidence might be buried in the answer - I don't know if this is my own bias (depression?), I can't help but think that there's the tiniest edge of "I'm not worth learning this", which snowballs in a big way. Lack of confidence would be an obvious blocker though.

It is so amazing how quickly he was able to resolve this tool. 2 weeks to build a very specialized tool AND perform the optimizations on the code. What am I doing with my life?

angersock 10y ago

Statistically speaking--given the tech sector demographics--something on the web or using a managed language. I'm not saying that programmers are getting worse--actually wait, no, that's what I'm saying (myself included).

gravypod 10y ago

Two weeks in game dev is like a year in a standard industry. You work hard when your job is your hobby, passion, and profession.

papaver 10y ago

insomniac has been working on this kind of stuff for the last decade... the stuff they do is impressive, but don't think it just happened out of the blue...

meredydd 10y ago

On one hand: Yes, this is an extremely cool hack. Hats off. On the other hand: It probably seems particularly impressive because its building blocks don't happen to be in your skill set. A rule of thumb: Something is impressive in proportion to how many times you think "How did they do that?!". In this case, if you're not already familiar with disassembly, binary instrumentation, how caches work, etc, then every step along this way sounds magical. But to a low-level/systems programmer, this sort of thing is their bread and butter. So their reaction wouldn't be "OMG how did he even...?" - it's probably more like "Niiiiiiice". (If you are, eg, a web developer, you probably have an equivalently ridiculous level of background knowledge about the internals of 5+ levels of the web stack, and how each goes wrong. I have seen systems guys - people who would jump on this project in a heartbeat - take one look at modern web dev and flee with their head in their hands, asking "how do they know all that stuff?!")

bronxbomber92 10y ago
Heh, not the best example to make your point [in this context] because the presenter also manages a group that writes/maintains the companies web tools, which consists of 340,000 lines of Javascript and 500,000 lines of C++ server-side code.. :) https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspostmortem.pdf https://deplinenoise.files.wordpress.com/2017/03/webtoolspos... My experience has been that people who are good at the bottom layers of the stack are good with the top layers of the stack, too. And if they're unfamiliar, they can ramp very up quickly.
- meredydd 10y ago
  [Update - Holy Moses, that presentation is amazing! It's a perfect illustration of what happens when you don't have the background of experience that web devs do, and just throw a bunch of smart but inexperienced C++ devs at a huge Javascript project. They walked into every rake in that grass, and I get a distinct subtext of "holy crap, I would never have believed the tooling was this bad..."] My comment addresses the perception that "OMG programmers today know nothing; this is what a Real Man looks like". Someone learning web development has spent a lot of brain-space on learning a level of in-depth knowledge that also looks magical to someone who hadn't. As it happens, I too think that the things you learn lower down the stack tend to make you a better engineer, whereas what you learn higher up the stack is too often an unedifying schlep. High-level systems spend a lot of complexity solving problems created by the layer underneath. (This goes 10x for web frameworks.) Low-level systems are more tightly constrained by the boundaries of the possible, so they spend their complexity on more fundamental problems. The same amount of time and intelligence spent learning the ins and outs of Angular yields less transferable skills than learning how compilers work. But if you need to build a web startup, compiler expertise on its own won't help you. It's like learning physics vs biology. Sure, physics is more fundamental, and a physicist learning biology usually has an easier time than the other way round. But a research biologist has also spent their time acquiring an immense amount of expertise, and fundamentally we need medical advances more directly than we need confirmation of the Higgs boson.

midnightclubbed 10y ago

Unless I'm missing something he got approval for 2 weeks to dig in ... doesn't say how long the entire project took (typically something like this would be a part-time task while working on immediate team/game needs). Fantastic work though and wonderful that insomniac have open sourced it.

xsmasher 10y ago

It may have been months of thinking and two weeks of coding. Once the stars align things can happen very quickly!

i336_ 10y ago

It would be so awesome if we could simply springboard off the "wow, this is amazing..." factor of highly novel ideas we've never heard of before and leverage our awe to soak in new things at superspeed. Instead, we get overwhelmed and demotivated and think "I could never learn that" - which only serves to send is spiralling in the opposite direction! Completely serious question/request: I'd be hugely interested in psychology hacks/ideas that short-circuit the brain (safely) to remedy this "thinking anti-pattern". I think self-worth and confidence might be buried in the answer - I don't know if this is my own bias (depression?), I can't help but think that there's the tiniest edge of "I'm not worth learning this", which snowballs in a big way. Lack of confidence would be an obvious blocker though.