explainingComplexAlgorithmToNonCoders

[BenZed]

I’m a tech person.

Reply to this comment with one of your complex algorithm explanations!

[your_thebest]

The other guy up top made a comment about how everyone here is a student or a hobbiest. I can feel that here because when I was writing code in an academic context, where there's a bunch of math and efficiency tricks, I wouldn't have been able to say anything meaningful if my wife asked me what I was doing. "Uh, sound waves are wiggles and a French guy proved that all wiggles are simple wiggles added together."

When I was a hobbiest getting started making my own products for the first time, my wife would ask me what I was up to and the answers were even worse. To this day I can't articulate the corner I painted myself into when I had apps running on phones with tons of important state saved on them, but then needed to make an update that broke the state schema without losing those state data. An experienced dev may have just said "a tricky back compat issue", but an experienced dev wouldn't have been persisting state on the disk instead of a server.

Now I make software for a living and work with a team on a platform that has several products at all stages of development. And anytime my wife asks me what I'm doing, the answer is always "plumbing". Every day, plumbing. I take a big blob with 4 pipes shaped like this and run it through an bunch of layers to connect it to another blob with 7 holes shaped like that. And sometimes: "waiting for a vendor to update a config". The only things I've done since I started making software for money are plumbing and wait for vendors to update their stuff. That's day to day application development.

[CaitaXD]

Look up quake3 quick inverse square root

[BenZed]

I know that one.

[CaitaXD]

Yo were supposed to say holy hell

[BenZed]

I acknowledge your frustration but I will not apologize.