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I had an employee like that. He'd want to do something, and hit a roadblock, so he'd design his own tool (He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like t
by ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I had an employee like that.
He'd want to do something, and hit a roadblock, so he'd design his own tool (He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way the built-in ones worked at teeny point sizes).
Best damn engineer I ever knew, but I had to keep an eye out for rabbitholing.
- mrspuratic 2y agoI didn't just create my own font, I created a font editor too because nothing else was just right (context: MSDOS 5/VGA era). For clarity, I was not that employee :) Up until quite recently I used to render a fixed-width TrueType to bitmaps so I could fix some rendering and typographical foibles, in order to use it with rxvt. I too may have a rabbit-holing problem.
- jandrese 2y agoBabbage would have likely had more success if he stayed in England and opened his own precision machine shop.
- DemocracyFTW2 2y agoMy thinking exactly. He could've created a market for adding machines and, building on commercial success, use revenues to build more ambitious machines.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoAnd he may well have done, if Ada Lovelace hadn't got cancer: she had managed to convince him to let her run his business, leaving him to deal only with R&D.
- m463 2y ago> He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way... Wonder how many folks here have done the same thing, building and discarding in the throes of creation like tibetan monks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Izkata 2y agoI've used fontforge out of curiosity before, but never kept what I made. I am still using a custom mouse cursor I made almost 20 years ago.
- interactivecode 2y agoPlease share! Super curious what the cursor looks like
- Izkata 2y agoA quick recording: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Izkata/RandomDren/refs/heads/master/FoxCursor/FoxCursorExample.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Izkata/RandomDren/refs/hea... I got the idea from another cursor I'd seen back then, and the basic tail was based on it. I think I did the animated ones, the blue dot was my own addition, and the fox head is entirely my own creation. It doesn't actually flicker in and out like that, it seems to be some quirk from recording it.
- maxbond 2y agoObviously yak shaving is a hazard in that it can result in the original project getting abandoned or deadlines being missed, but often the tools you develop along the way are more (economically) valuable than the original project. They're often more widely applicable and narrower in scope, so they're more likely to get done and more likely to find an audience. An example that comes to my mind is the Rust library mio. The Metal database for which it was the I/O component never materialized. But mio is a core component in the Rust ecosystem. Similarly, many applications could benefit from a font that's legible at tiny sizes, not just the one that it was developed for. (Though obviously in most work cultures, this would be considered inappropriate, and for good reasons. My remarks apply mostly to greenfield research/personal projects where deadlines are loose.)
- suzzer99 2y agoWe had a developer write his own System.out.println in Java. But it wasn't because he didn't like the built-in System.out.println, it was because he didn't know it existed. He had a PhD and was supposedly a senior developer. He didn't last very long.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zanderwohl 2y agoHe must have had a very interesting educational path to write functional Java code without knowing about println. I marvel at that. I almost admire it. Because I think pretty much every tutorial in the world for every language starts with printing, and every project has it someplace. He must have learned via some esoteric means.
- suzzer99 2y agoHe worked for some failed startup before we got him. Our project manager who had worked with him there, brought him in and said he was a genius. I think maybe Java wasn't his first language. But to me, not realizing that Java would have something like System.out.println was a bad sign.
- rchervot 2y agoI believe it was System.out.printf not System.out.println
- peeters 2y agoTo be fair that was quite a late addition to the language all things considered. It could be he learned Java before it existed, or had most of his experience in 1.4 (which survived quite long in some environments because 1.5 was such a huge overhaul). But still, a good dev will keep up to date with language features.
- 2y ago
- eru 2y ago> (He wrote his own font, once, because he didn't like the way the built-in ones worked at teeny point sizes). That's similar to how Donald Knuth came up with TeX and Metafont.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y agoI'm told the story of Godbolt[0] is similar. I think that he has an ID here, so we could probably ask him. It's a very good tool. [0] https://godbolt.org https://godbolt.org
- eru 2y agoApproximately everyone loves godbolt, yes!