3 ms·

I think IRC was a big part of community knowledge and also such a hot spot for weird inspiration. I can attribute my picking up of Common Lisp and ultimately ge

by Guthur 3y ago

I think IRC was a big part of community knowledge and also such a hot spot for weird inspiration. I can attribute my picking up of Common Lisp and ultimately getting a job in Australia from the UK to an off the cuff comment by someone in IRC.

59nadir 3y ago
I started learning programming (C++) when I was 12-13 (2000-2001) because a guy on QuakeNet told me I should learn how to code if I want to learn about hacking. All these years later I'm very well paid to create distributed systems in technologies I could've never imagined back then. The funny thing is that I want to stop doing that and have other problems instead, because I'm just tired of everything that has to do with what (mostly) web development (and other distributed systems) has become and this incessant either layering more things on top of other things or adding extraneous things. I'm currently re-orienting around a possible switch to game development. (For those who might think I'm being impossibly naïve; I have plenty of lower-level experience and have worked at 2 game studios previously, it's not that foreign of a world. I originally left to do consulting because it paid significantly better.)
- Guthur 3y ago
  With games as a service and increasing desire to de-risk large projects I'd be a little wary of the grass is greener. There might be something a kin to old school hacking in the indie domain.
  - Guthur 3y ago
    If you've got really top notch low level skills then maybe something in HFT financial space.
  - 59nadir 3y ago
    I think the point about grass being greener is a good one in general, but I have to say that I'm wording things specifically to account for this: I want other problems than the ones I have now. I don't like the problems modern distributed systems development present me with anymore. It's boring and I genuinely feel like we keep having issues that shouldn't even be issues because of the technologies we use and the layers/systems that have been added to everything. I will also say, having worked at game studios before I believe them to have a much better barometer for what is extraneous, so even the live services teams at these places tend to be a lot more sensible than your average web shop. Your mileage may vary, though. Games as a service and de-risking large projects I'm not sure is that relevant? Someone has to work on the engine, the networking code, and so on, and this work is largely not really going anywhere. There have been approximately zero innovations in the last 20 years that remove the need for being able to write lower-level code and knowing the internals of a game engine, provided you want to make something half-way decent. Even if game studios somehow manage to not do the work I'm interested in, I might just take an extremely long sabbatical while continuing to make games and work on those things. There is an alternate future where I also try to create custom solutions as a contractor in performance-critical niches and still work primarily with backend stuff, but I'm not sure what that would mean.
dijit 3y ago
I learned linux only because people on IRC were willing to handhold me through it. Microsoft had a very strong hold on education during that period. I didn't learn anything outside of the Microsoft Ecosystem: Excel and Word, yes, but also Access and VB.NET when I was trying to get into programming.
jghn 3y ago
There were things like IRC and Usenet. But the thing I remember most was books. Lots and lots of books. And doing things like building up a mental model of the indexes for their reference sections so I could look things up quickly. And doing something similar for `man`, being able to recite from memory that I wanted `man 3 foo` instead of `man 5 foo`. Having direct access to good reference material was was critical, and often that meant hardcopy.

by Guthur 3y ago

59nadir 3y ago

I started learning programming (C++) when I was 12-13 (2000-2001) because a guy on QuakeNet told me I should learn how to code if I want to learn about hacking. All these years later I'm very well paid to create distributed systems in technologies I could've never imagined back then. The funny thing is that I want to stop doing that and have other problems instead, because I'm just tired of everything that has to do with what (mostly) web development (and other distributed systems) has become and this incessant either layering more things on top of other things or adding extraneous things. I'm currently re-orienting around a possible switch to game development. (For those who might think I'm being impossibly naïve; I have plenty of lower-level experience and have worked at 2 game studios previously, it's not that foreign of a world. I originally left to do consulting because it paid significantly better.)

Guthur 3y ago
With games as a service and increasing desire to de-risk large projects I'd be a little wary of the grass is greener. There might be something a kin to old school hacking in the indie domain.
- Guthur 3y ago
  If you've got really top notch low level skills then maybe something in HFT financial space.
- 59nadir 3y ago
  I think the point about grass being greener is a good one in general, but I have to say that I'm wording things specifically to account for this: I want other problems than the ones I have now. I don't like the problems modern distributed systems development present me with anymore. It's boring and I genuinely feel like we keep having issues that shouldn't even be issues because of the technologies we use and the layers/systems that have been added to everything. I will also say, having worked at game studios before I believe them to have a much better barometer for what is extraneous, so even the live services teams at these places tend to be a lot more sensible than your average web shop. Your mileage may vary, though. Games as a service and de-risking large projects I'm not sure is that relevant? Someone has to work on the engine, the networking code, and so on, and this work is largely not really going anywhere. There have been approximately zero innovations in the last 20 years that remove the need for being able to write lower-level code and knowing the internals of a game engine, provided you want to make something half-way decent. Even if game studios somehow manage to not do the work I'm interested in, I might just take an extremely long sabbatical while continuing to make games and work on those things. There is an alternate future where I also try to create custom solutions as a contractor in performance-critical niches and still work primarily with backend stuff, but I'm not sure what that would mean.

dijit 3y ago

I learned linux only because people on IRC were willing to handhold me through it. Microsoft had a very strong hold on education during that period. I didn't learn anything outside of the Microsoft Ecosystem: Excel and Word, yes, but also Access and VB.NET when I was trying to get into programming.

jghn 3y ago

There were things like IRC and Usenet. But the thing I remember most was books. Lots and lots of books. And doing things like building up a mental model of the indexes for their reference sections so I could look things up quickly. And doing something similar for `man`, being able to recite from memory that I wanted `man 3 foo` instead of `man 5 foo`. Having direct access to good reference material was was critical, and often that meant hardcopy.