4 ms·
Oh man - of all my 'nerd crushes' Michael is at the absolute top. I feel like he hasn't been risen up to the stature of John Carmack but if you look at the thi
by kar1181 6y ago
Oh man - of all my 'nerd crushes' Michael is at the absolute top.
I feel like he hasn't been risen up to the stature of John Carmack but if you look at the things he's shipped in his career (no less than Quake AND Windows NT) and at the sheer volume of content he produced during those halcyon days in the late 80s/90s when the PC emerged from dumb as rocks beige business box to premier gaming platform, he is a key figure.
I was too young and grew up too remote to have access to his writings as they were written but as an older engineer going back over his Graphics Black Book, the Zen of Assembly books and his Dr Dobbs articles, there's a lot of lessons that you can learn that still have a lot of value today.
Actually one of the best lessons - and most easily accessible - is in the first chapter of his graphics black book, he talks about the human element of optimisation, and that it is critical to optimise the right thing. He uses an example of a engineer he knew that in the era of early electronic calculators (still clunky and and slow, but getting faster all the time) honed his slide rule skills to wipe the floor with any desktop calculator operator. But he was spitting into the wind, it was clear calculators were getting faster and there was no more road with slide rules.
Ultimately he wasted effort on a legacy technology rather than leveraging what was up and coming.
In many ways this mirrored the PC, in its early days, it was slow, dumb and unwieldy, but it was improving at a rate of knots and eventually came to dominate.
Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github and maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats. They aren't terribly applicable technologically to computing today but they are very readable and contain a lot of general purpose problem solving and optimisation tips that are as applicable today as they were then.
https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book
There have been few technical writers emerge that match Michael Abrash and it makes me so happy he's still hacking away at interesting problems today. Shame he doesn't write as much as he did, but I'm sure he's busy trying to usher in the metaverse (snowcrash had a big influence on him)!
- furyofantares 6y agoI lucked my way into a lunch with Michael somewhat under 10 years ago and had a chance to pick his brain, and of course express gratitude for his writing which had an influence on me when I was younger. What I found really remarkable, though, was he also picked my brain -- a junior programmer with no notable accomplishments, working on not very interesting problems. And when I bumped into him on a couple occasions after that, he remembered what I worked on and would ask how it was going.
- eru 6y agoThat's very good manners. And I suspect a prodigious memory was a part of what made him so successful over his career. If Michael can remember your details, he'll surely remember all kinds of other details as well and have them at his command.
- kar1181 6y agoI forgot to add, Michael did a post-mortem at GDC a year or so after shipping and you can access it online still (requires Flash though?!) https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014236/Quake-A-Post-Mortem-and https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014236/Quake-A-Post-Mortem-an...
- pengaru 6y agoSomeone please transcode and upload this to somewhere like YouTube already.
- tomovo 6y agoIn Safari I'm seeing audio only but I was able to download & play it on my way to work. Great talk. I did miss seeing the slides when he talked about some BSP & PVS features but it was great nonetheless. And who crashed that car? Was it Jeff R. ?
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago> Both Michael's Black Book and Zen of Assembly are on Github and maintained as PDF, Epub and other formats Do you know of a source for Dr Dobbs too? I've found this so far [0] but no luck yet with more recent volumes. [0]: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal
- kar1181 6y agoThe archive dvds thank goodness have been preserved which will cover you up until 2008. https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6 https://archive.org/details/DDJDVD6
- mysterydip 6y agoWhen I first got the black book, I wanted to skip over the first chapter and get to "the good stuff", but forced myself to read it. It was the most useful info in that book (even more obvious today as few use the kinds of tricks found in the remainder): you can take hours/days/longer optimizing to the nth degree some algorithm that is used in a for loop, but better still is taking a bigger picture look and finding out you can accomplish the same thing a different way without needing the for loop at all.
- touisteur 6y agoThere, you said it. It's one of the best books on computer science, hacking, software engineering, high performance software... But my favorite part is always those chapter starters. Light philosophy and stories about taking a step back, looking for your own bias, measuring first then optimizing, trust but verify... I also appreciate how he always gave credit, and it was kind of funny to see him always impressed by John Carmack. I wish I could meet him one day but I expect my brain would empty out and I'd just stay there nerd-giggling and gushing.
- pronoiac 6y agoOoh, I hadn't seen those repos before! I'll check them out! I've worked on converting a book to useful markdown, and hopefully epub and pdf, and there could useful processes there.
- kranner 6y agoGreat writing too! If I remember a chapter title correctly: "The best optimizer is between your ears!"