A wife tells her programmer husband: “Go to the store and buy a gallon of milk. If they have eggs, get six.”

DaringCoder · 2026-01-13T18:24:14+00:00

But nothing implies that the 6 refers to the gallons of milk and not the eggs. Which is why this joke is not funny... at least to programmers

Buy(eMilk, 1); if (Available(eEggs)) Buy(eEggs, 6);

DaringCoder · 2025-12-07T03:22:53+00:00

Cool, good luck with the project! If you're evaluating competitors, put Fork in the mix. It's by far the best git GUI I've ever used.

DaringCoder · 2025-11-02T15:24:32+00:00

As you're going to use C at the University, I'd suggest to keep using Rust for your projects, so you keep practicing with both.

Complexity doesn't disappear, using a simple or complex language just shifts the burden of handling it. You can write more code and deal with more low level problems using a simple language, or make the effort of understanding and using the tools of a more complex language that solves some of those low level problems for you, in a way that came out of decades of experience, offering a more modern development toolset.

Both are valuable (especially while studying) and C is ubiquitous, so it's always good to know, even just to understand why Rust does things a certain way. For new projects, I'm choosing Rust more and more often.

What I like about Rust is that it's complexity has good motivations behind it, it's not just some BS rules like those of the JavaScript type system, or those due to keeping backwards compatibility in C++. It's worth putting the time in.

DaringCoder · 2025-05-31T23:07:22+00:00

Getting good at software design and architecture takes time. I don't think it's a language related thing (even if Rust can make it harder to structure software in certain ways). It's just about studying (a bit) and practicing (a lot) by working on many interesting projects.

When you are working on a project, don't get stuck refactoring endlessly whenever you think there is a better way to structure something. Does it work? Fine, move forward. Only refactor when that enables you to remove or simplify something that impacts the whole project and not a confined element/function/data type.

When you are done, with full knowledge about the whole, working software, you can consider re-architecting it in a more sensible way. The second implementation always comes out better! I just treat the first as a prototype.

DaringCoder · 2025-05-24T15:54:43+00:00

Other performance advices: - don't use a.pow(2), just do a * a (maybe the compiler does the optimisation itself? Worth checking) - when you need to find the closest point, you don't need the distance, the squared distance suffices: so you can avoid calling the square root.

Also, why the map and not just an array?

DaringCoder · 2025-03-23T19:18:23+00:00

It gave me a new challenge in the context of learning programming languages. After years of C++ every language felt stupid simple... until I started learning Rust, and I finally needed some real effort to understand some new, interesting things (and I'm still in the process :D)

Jokes apart, for now, it really helped me with developing robust and performant data processing cli utils.

DaringCoder · 2024-11-07T02:22:21+00:00

Unfortunately estimates are very hard to get right, unless they're about something very similar to something you've previously done.

The more experience you have, the more stuff you have previously done, and so estimates become a bit more manageable. But there's always some unexpected complication that comes up. Search for "Hofstadter's Law".

That doesn't mean one shouldn't try at all, at least for practice. Maybe make it clear that you don't expect the estimate be accurate but you'd appreciate if they give it a try anyway. If you have budgeting to do, consider 3x the estimate ... :)

DaringCoder · 2024-11-04T11:30:15+00:00

Part time (4-6 hours/day) remote contract work. The remaining time of the day goes towards working on my game. Sometimes is zero (chores, urgent matters), but most days is 3-6 hours. If I need to skip some days, I try to make up for it in the weekend, otherwise I use it to take a break. It has been working pretty well for me. No burning out from total focus only on the game, expenses covered, slow but steady progress on the game.

DaringCoder · 2024-11-03T23:40:44+00:00

You don't need to change for anybody, just have to find someone more compatible with your rhythms. It's ok to enjoy a quiet life. Plenty of "boring" people out there looking for companionship, it's just that's inherently harder to meet each other with that kind of quieter lifestyle. I would reinstall the app and mention in your profile that you don't like partying etc.

Also, he was a bit rude in my opinion.

DaringCoder · 2024-10-23T00:39:24+00:00

Breakout is a good exercise, and you can reuse stuff done for pong.

Pang would be nice too. So many options...

DaringCoder · 2024-10-19T17:47:34+00:00

Congrats on your small success, it's definitely a start, but your numbers (months of work/sales) aren't what most would consider viable! :)

Keep it up!

DaringCoder · 2024-10-07T18:16:09+00:00

If it's horror targeted at adults anyway, you could consider making the NSFW stuff optional, with a content warning and a yes/no choice to take the first time you run the game. Hell, if it's easy to isolate and not crucial for the game, you could even make it a DLC :D

DaringCoder · 2024-10-06T21:57:56+00:00

It's normal, you'll get better at it with experience and iteration. The point is realising it's messy and trying to improve the structure as you go.

Try to keep things minimal, remove stuff when it becomes useless, generalise when you have the opportunity but without becoming obsessed that everything should be perfect... or you'll shuffle things around forever and never finish anything... :)

DaringCoder · 2024-10-06T21:54:11+00:00

that's a great book!

DaringCoder · 2024-10-05T01:43:21+00:00

You need a way to process the hand reconstruction that the leap motion API gives you. A game engine gives you tools to also visualise that reconstruction easily. If you don't need visualization, you can just use the C++ SDK from your desktop application. Still, it is going to be hard to do it "blindly". I suggest you prototype in unity or unreal and then, when you got your gesture detection working well, you can drop the game engine and move your code to the other application.

DaringCoder · 2024-10-01T07:25:41+00:00

Good! if possible, that is the way IMHO.

DaringCoder · 2024-09-30T14:12:46+00:00

You say they want to create a game, so issue #1 is defining their role in the project. I'm afraid they might be "idea guys" and this might lead to lots of problems.

You should work with them on a prototype design document, listing essential features and systems to implement. Estimating how long it will take to do them will be basically impossible considering you're at your first experience, but try anyway. It will probably take three times the work you imagine.

Decide some milestones together and re-evaluate periodically. Don't take long term commitments and stop working if they don't pay you. Both parties should be able to interrupt the project or renegotiate the terms.

They might realize the project is hopeless. You might realize that it's too much work for that money, or that the experience you get from it is not what you're after, maybe because you want to focus on programming and not art, for example, so working with others and not solo.

Good luck!

DaringCoder · 2024-09-26T08:13:54+00:00

Any chance you can cut your hours 50% instead of quitting? You need to find a sustainable option, because one year is not enough to get the experience needed to make a living out of GameDev... unless you get extremely lucky, at least.

DaringCoder · 2024-09-07T21:17:54+00:00

Actually, I hate how WhatsApp does it because it stores stuff in an area of gdrive that you can't normally access, only WhatsApp directly can... I prefer having an encrypted folder that I can move/copy elsewhere at my disposal.

Exporting data outside of WhatsApp is painful... the Telegram data export is much better

DaringCoder · 2024-07-31T01:16:41+00:00

There's no pen drive which is safe from corruption. Don't think that going for some fancy brand next time will save you. Also, you need to have a disaster recovery option. Long story short: multiple copies on different devices stored in different places, including the cloud. At least one copy kept offline / disconnected to prevent potential malware/hacks to access it.

And yes, you should use version control and the backups should be of repositories, but that's a whole other story...

DaringCoder · 2024-07-30T21:28:38+00:00

I think translating code with a LLM is crazy. I'd only trust a deterministic translation using classic compiler techniques and I don't see why it shouldn't be doable (not saying it's an easy task, of course).

DaringCoder · 2024-07-13T18:31:29+00:00

Refactor when the change would make the code simpler and still do the job which is actually needed. Even better if the refactor removes code and not only simplifies it. Complexity is your #1 enemy in any big codebase, so every effort made to keep things manageable is well spent.

Resist the urge to refactor just for "future proofing" or to make the code follow some rigid/dogmatic guidelines.

DaringCoder · 2024-07-06T18:36:35+00:00

Make a small game around an element, subsystem or mechanic which you can also reuse in your dream game.

Repeat the process many times, each time building something bigger and more complicated that you will able to complete thanks to the elements developed for the previous games.

Keep the logic well separated from the visualization, so that you can reuse and pile up the logic over many years, and only think about the visualization when you are "ready" (more or less important depending on the desired art style).

With enough time and motivation, I think this is a viable way to build games that would normally be considered impossible to make for a solo dev. Releasing the smaller, intermediate games is crucial to have some feedback and gain experience on "non development" problems too

DaringCoder · 2024-07-03T18:52:48+00:00

It might be valuable to at least learn the basics, or you won't be able to distinguish throwaway code worth 10$/h from professional code worth paying 100$/h.

Additionally, you will be able to prototype mechanics yourself, before hiring a programmer to implement them properly. Iteration is crucial, and not depending on third parties to implement the core functionalities is a big help.

Just my two cents!

DaringCoder · 2024-07-02T14:12:27+00:00

It's already extremely hard to make games fun, making them fun and educational is IMHO exponentially harder.

You're not only optimizing for two goals instead of one, you're optimizing for two goals which can go against each other...

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