Call me grumpy but 20 years ago we were making fun of smarty - a template engine made in a template engine - and now everything looks like a solution looking for a problem.
fun fact: last BigCo I worked in had an elaborate architecture/security bar for new applications/features but offered a clever workaround - you could use a pre-approved solution and skip numerous quality checks and approvals, so every single PO was pushing for that specific solution.
The result? A static html with 500 ppl audience was billing a whooping 2k EUR a month, because that was the cost of that pre-approved architecture.
Best part - I was championing a company wide solution for that problem for over a year, which resulted in board level special operation with 100k budget only to get that budget snugged by people couple steps above the ladder.
I'm getting "bring your adventure" vibe, similar to The Witness.
Take Thomas Was Alone for example - seemingly simple platform puzzle game with deep and engaging story where you're more interested about characters than new mechanics and puzzles.
In contrast The Witness could be scraped to core puzzles and released as an iPad game for $5.99, but the whimsical island and scattered pseudo intellectual voice clips make it so much more giving you opportunity to pause and think about life.
This seems very similar. A sokoban puzzle game with an entirely optional plot line that leaves a lot for interpretation by the player.
For me design patterns are more of vocabulary than a tool.
It's not about - hey I found this book and we'll be using these building block from now on - rather, it's about having words that everyone immediately recognizes and associate with exact same ideas.
"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1].
For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor.
I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles.
I'll give you a simple example.
Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important.
We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it.
Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review.
But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship.
And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do.
I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
I don't blog because, most of the time, I'm worried about what people might think. Sometimes I speak up in public and people are confused, so - I think - it will only be amplified online. Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
But most of all it's putting it all together.
There was this famous kid who only talked in tweets because he had ADHD. Sometimes series of tweets. Like 20 of them. But always in tweets, because that gave him control, and removed - or add, depends on your point of view - constraints.
Anyway - don't be like me. Speak up. Tell people what you want them to hear.
> Sometimes I want to share a bit of code, and I'm not sure if the formatting will please everyone. Or naming convention.
Do what pleases you. Write and share first and most importantly for yourself. If other people find it interesting or useful they will read, if not, they will not.
Writing is a muscle you need to train, so start with small topics you want to say stuff about, learn, it will become easier. Then do the big topics you want to say a lot about.
I see this sentiment a lot; I've written tens of thousands of comments on the internet (on different sites) over 25+ years. Am I a better writer? I don't feel like one. Is there anything objectively measurable that could answer that?
as a junior dev I completely understand the code sharing part: no matter if I write the code myself, or followed some guide about code styling/naming conventions/best coding practices, or assisted myself with an llm, the result is the same; I don't share the code at all, due to the fact of how many times I saw on the internet the "Why did you do it that way, no one does it that way" or some other discouraging comments, so no wonder that Stack Overflow was becoming less and less popular even before llm's if there is more people like me and people who were like me don't need such sites anymore since they upskilled since then. Nowadays only people reading my code (and subsuquently having a normal healthy talk, not a discussion - a talk!) is an LLM and my girlfriend or some random friend that asked what I'm up to nowadays when I was in the process of coding.
I encourage you to still share your ideas and thoughts. It doesn't need to be as a blog, but in general. :)
Don't censor yourself out of fear of what others might think or misunderstand.
Many may get confused and some might not like it, but there may also be a small group of people who understand, which if you fall silent couldn't be reached.
Main problem with highly competitive games is that you can run them inside a container and have full access to memory.
Most games will share all the data with every client which makes it trivial to display positions of every enemy on the map. It's just convenient for developers.
In games like Tarkov, once you spawn in, your client gets all the information that possible - positions of players, their names, equipment, contents of every single container on the map.
Tarkov is not the best example, because the netcode is terrible, and the architecure is a joke - you can loot everything on the map with a keystroke, and kill anyone with another, but other games are not better.
Even in Valorant, which makes an extra effort to only send data relevant to the player - ie. data about player that you are about to see - you can use that to see around the corners.
I see where you coming from, but that only tells half of the story.
I've been sporting the same model of Ecco shoes since high school. 10+ models over the years. And every new model is significantly worse than the previous one. The one I have right now is most definitely the last one I bought.
If you would put them right next to the ones I had in high school you'd say they are a cheap, temu knock offs. And this applies to pretty much everything we touch right now. From home appliance to cars.
Some 15 years ago H&M was a forefront of whats called "fast fashion". The idea was that you could buy new clothes for a fraction of the price at the cost of quality. Makes sense on paper - if you're a fashion junkie and you want a new outlook every season you don't care about quality.
The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now.
People like to talk about lightbulb conspiracy, but we fell victims to VC capital reality where short term gains trumps everything else.
> The problem is I still have some of their clothes I bought 10 years ago and their quality trumps premium brands now.
I'm skeptical of this claim. Maybe it's true for some particular brand but that's just an artifact of one particular "premium brand" essentially cashing in its brand equity by reducing quality while (temporarily) being able to command a premium price. But it is easier now than at any other time in my life to purchase high-quality clothing that is built to last for decades. You just have to pay for that quality, which is something a lot of people don't want to do.
My last CTO was hired after me, the org was hyperscaling.
When i was interviewed I was told that the company is banking on JS and that's what we were doing on both ends [1]
When CTO was hired he made a walk through the office, greeting every team, he stopped at our cubicle and asked what we were doing - I told him basics - and he said "you should be doing that in Java".
Few weeks later he had a townhall presentation. He came to a room full of people, plug in his computer and the screen started playing a pornhub flix.
I think it is sour grapes that new CTO didn’t know shit and even did full embarrassment on display - yet tech guy who knew his job was let go most likely with his team just because CTO thought whatever they were doing should be in Java.
javascript coder joined taking the company's statement in good faith "everything will be javascript, the front and back end both" and happily did it
New CTO joins, warmly visits all, dude who joined in good faith parrots his understanding of what we're doing to the CTO. CTO reacts "NO IT MUST BE JAVA" and this is a flex new CTOs love to do -rewrite everything- often to failure
javascript coder now arguably may no longer be needed if he's not a java programmer, maybe CTO is bringing in their own guys, gets canned.. gets canned by a clown who (a) is watching porn during work and (b) shows it to everybody and (c) leadership above the CTO saw this and did nothing
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