2 ms·

I’m not someone of Raph’s caliber, but this reminds me of my own career rabbit hole. In 2002 I was a film student with a “new media” side job (that’s what they

by pavlov 6y ago

I’m not someone of Raph’s caliber, but this reminds me of my own career rabbit hole. In 2002 I was a film student with a “new media” side job (that’s what they used to call web/Flash development). I had cleared my schedule for six months so I could work on an ambitious animation project mixing 2D and 3D. As I got started, I figured I’d need to write some scripts for a 3D application I was using (Softimage). Looking deeper, I came to the conclusion my needs were complex enough that I should write a small separate application rather than scripts. Then I realized my application would need a little compositing engine to mirror what existed in Softimage. To make that work fast enough, I needed to learn about GPU shaders (brand new at the era). Also I needed to learn about YUV pixel formats and media containers... Flash forward 18 years, I’m still at the bottom of this rabbit hole, sometimes halfheartedly looking for the door to go back up but just finding more glimpses into weirder wonderlands. I wrote another YUV compositor just a couple of months ago, but haven’t made a serious attempt at animation in probably 15 years. I wonder if other people have this kind of experience, and whether there’s some kind of law of “tech stack career gravity” in evidence here. When you become expert in something lower level, it increases the “career delta-v” to move back up.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
megameter 6y ago
It's a "forever project". [0] If you look at a lot of luminary careers, they also involve forever projects that happen to produce a digestible result. There's an element of needing a bit of direction and structure so that you don't go full "mad scientist" and lose your grounding. For me, the actual forever project, if I had to put words to it, is something to do with studies in the cybernetics of creativity, or in ELI5 terms: "why is making games hard?" It's not really approachable just by making a slightly better tool, or a great tutorial, or a magic algorithm, or by organizing a great team for a single project - and the scope is multidisciplinary, making it less legible what I'm doing or why. But if I examine all my attempts there is an orbit to it that is gradually getting tighter. With respect to examining low level issues in computing there's a huge pull to engage in forever projects because everywhere you look, the solutions being built on are rough-and-ready ideas rushed into production decades ago and then examined only occasionally afterwards. My own efforts started getting sucked into the gravity well of "perhaps I need to write a language, an operating system and a runtime environment to properly express this" - I managed to climb out again recently by focusing on formats, data portability and conceptual specifications instead of concrete ones with actively maintained production code - it's always the maintenance that is a killer and I can see that being an issue for Piet's current strategy too. Our ability to conceptualize always outstrips the daily grind, but we need to have one to stay in that grounded mode. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834

by pavlov 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

megameter 6y ago

It's a "forever project". [0] If you look at a lot of luminary careers, they also involve forever projects that happen to produce a digestible result. There's an element of needing a bit of direction and structure so that you don't go full "mad scientist" and lose your grounding. For me, the actual forever project, if I had to put words to it, is something to do with studies in the cybernetics of creativity, or in ELI5 terms: "why is making games hard?" It's not really approachable just by making a slightly better tool, or a great tutorial, or a magic algorithm, or by organizing a great team for a single project - and the scope is multidisciplinary, making it less legible what I'm doing or why. But if I examine all my attempts there is an orbit to it that is gradually getting tighter. With respect to examining low level issues in computing there's a huge pull to engage in forever projects because everywhere you look, the solutions being built on are rough-and-ready ideas rushed into production decades ago and then examined only occasionally afterwards. My own efforts started getting sucked into the gravity well of "perhaps I need to write a language, an operating system and a runtime environment to properly express this" - I managed to climb out again recently by focusing on formats, data portability and conceptual specifications instead of concrete ones with actively maintained production code - it's always the maintenance that is a killer and I can see that being an issue for Piet's current strategy too. Our ability to conceptualize always outstrips the daily grind, but we need to have one to stay in that grounded mode. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24917834