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I like this question! I think that working in constrained environments early in my career gave me lasting instincts both for efficiency and maintainability/sus
by pacaro 10y ago
I like this question!
I think that working in constrained environments early in my career gave me lasting instincts both for efficiency and maintainability/sustainability. I wrote a lot of code on Win16, GeoOS, Epoc32, and a variety of embedded systems. Debugging tools aren't good, the dev-test-repeat cycle can be arbitrarily long, so you learn to avoid a certain sloppiness.
I've been having fun with PICO-8 on a Pocket CHIP, it has some similar constraints, the keyboard is awful and the screen is small, so there are similar incentives, and the added bonus that making a cute game is fairly accessible.
- pacaro 10y agoAlso, pre-internet I learned from books. I lived in a provincial town, so I would go to London, buy a book and then devour it, but if I didn't understand something, I had to either keep plugging away until I did understand it, or wait possibly weeks til my next opportunity to find another explanation. Keeping looking at blogs until you find an explanation that makes sense is an amazing resource for getting shit done, but doesn't encourage deep understanding when you really need to internalize something
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- thr0waway1239 10y agoReminded me of this story about Donald Knuth: https://www.quora.com/How-would-Donald-Knuth-fare-as-a-competitor-on-TopCoder-today/answer/Michael-Hayter?srid=zo6v https://www.quora.com/How-would-Donald-Knuth-fare-as-a-compe...