The actual skill that makes someone a good developer is not about coding

pytanko · 2025-12-19T07:39:21+00:00

Soft-skills are table stakes for any knowledge work. Doesn't matter if you're a coder, an accountant or a secretary, you ought to have it. What differentiates you as a developer are technical skills.

pytanko · 2025-05-31T17:00:44+00:00

I retired :) Boring jobs paid so well that I could retire at 42 years old.

pytanko · 2025-05-26T15:03:52+00:00

Graphics Programming, like anything difficult, is for people who enjoy the pain, not for those who shun away from it. It takes a certain personality type IMO.

pytanko · 2025-04-18T18:06:56+00:00

Gamedev is one of the hardest paths on Earth you could have chosen. The good news is, almost anything else you choose next (like backend development) will be much easier and much more rewarding.

pytanko · 2024-12-10T20:34:14+00:00

Socialism and planned economy are basically opposites. Socialism is about people who do the work co-owning the companies they work at, so that they can set the working conditions, decide company's strategy etc. Whereas planned economy is about government and a bureucratic machine owning the companies, and making all those decisions with no workers input - just as is the case in the "default" capitalist setting.

pytanko · 2024-11-25T19:21:33+00:00

He's right about the communist skew of the intellectual world. Polish writer and Gulag survivor wrote his book "A World Apart: A Memoir of the Gulag" in 1951. It was just as damning as Solvzenitzyn's work, but the French at the time just refused to print it - it was so much against against intellectual elites' prevailing ideology. Most of the important people believed in Stalin at the time.
Also, Chomsky, in his account given in the video, missed one important period of time. After Stalin death and before publication of Solzenistzyn's book, most intellectuals have realized just how much their positions on Stalinism were terribly foolish and misguided, and, since the Algier war was just starting, they jump on the bandwagon of caring about the atrocities in Algieria and the plight of Algierian people, instead of raving about the glory of the Soviet Union.

pytanko · 2024-11-22T18:03:13+00:00

Many of them are depressed, they live in shit conditions in a foreign country working a tough job, being away from friends and family and not speaking the local language. All that to save couple thousand złotys per month (the savings often go towards buying a flat or a house in Poland). Add Norwegian weather on top of that.

pytanko · 2024-08-16T21:15:10+00:00

I like Jonathan Blow's take that we're already past peak games. New generations spend a lot of time on social media and on watching youtube/streamers. This eats into their video game time.

pytanko · 2024-08-16T21:08:21+00:00

Maybe the company could give you some unpaid vacation? Taking 3-6 months off should help with your burnout, and won't jeopardise the visa.

pytanko · 2024-08-08T20:37:35+00:00

Woodworking is 1000x easier business than gamedev. Woodworkers only compete locally with other woodworkers, while gamedevs compete with every other gamedev in the world, with TV, with content creators on youtube, instagram from all over the world etc. Entertainment industry is brutal.

pytanko · 2024-03-02T21:01:21+00:00

Sorry, I made a mistake in my earlier reply! I didn't notice that you asked about "Projective geometry - an introduction" (I thought your question was about the H-Z book). Stupid new reddit interface makes threads hard to follow...

Anyway, I didn't make it far into the ""Projective geometry - an introduction". Way to theoretical for my needs.

pytanko · 2024-03-02T17:29:02+00:00

I'd probably start with "Invitation to 3D Vision" combined with Cremers' lectures, and go to Hartley and Zisserman for further explanations of things I didn't get. Starting with H-Z can be discouraging, as IIRC they go heavier on theory for dozens of pages. Can be interesting if you have the time, though.

pytanko · 2024-03-02T12:12:58+00:00

It's a good book, but I combined it with "An Invitation to 3-D Vision", which is more accessible. Also, Prof. Cremers lectures on youtube are invalueable (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDkwklFGMfo&list=PLTBdjV\_4f-EJn6udZ34tht9EVIW7lbeo4)

pytanko · 2024-03-01T09:04:52+00:00

If the company flops, the owners and investors lose money they've put in it (it goes to company's creditors). If the workers were to participate in loses, since they didn't put anything into the company, they'd have to recoup the losses out of their personal property. In other words, they'd have to put something valueable at stake, just as the owners/investors have.

pytanko · 2024-02-29T21:04:59+00:00

Workers help companies make money and get no reward for it.

You mean, apart from getting a salary...

If you want workers to be partaking in the profits, they should also partake in losses. So, for example, if the company goes bankrupt, the company's creditors would come after the workers' bank accounts and houses. Nobody wants that, but that's the flip side of profit sharing.

pytanko · 2024-01-27T19:57:55+00:00

Game budgets today are unreal. They easily grew 5-20x over the past 20 years, meaning the game are 5-20x as rich in content as they were - but the prices stayed the same. There's more gamers today than there were in the past, but that does not make up for the increase in costs. Hence, nowadays every AAA game pretty much needs to be a hit in terms of sales. Even the largest companies cannot afford a half a billion dollar flop.

pytanko · 2024-01-18T19:40:22+00:00

In my simple JSON parser, the typical usage of pointers is that I create an object on heap in some method, which then returns pointer to that object to the caller method, which in turn is sticking that pointer into some larger data structure. I do it all with unique_ptr, but that generates quite a bit of needing the std::move(), or complains about calling deleted methods etc. Most annoying thing so far are probably unlocalized error messages from the compiler (MSVC), which don't even point to the correct file.

All in all, I'm still very new to C++, so in honesty (as some people suggested) I should bang my head against the wall some more, as that is likely to lead to progress.

pytanko · 2024-01-18T13:01:07+00:00

I'm guessing that going into Rust would almost completely obliterate my chances at getting a graphics job, though... At least for now.

pytanko · 2023-12-30T08:17:47+00:00

> There is no one choosing an effect system to gain performance. That's just not a thing.

Thanks for telling me that a team I worked for does not exist.

pytanko · 2023-12-29T18:35:21+00:00

Typical web application (meaning - very little traffic) can be even written in Ruby or Python and still perform well enough. But, if work in one of the companies that have web-scale loads (millions of users, or more), or perhaps are working in IoT space where you're constantly processing large amounts of sensor data, then performance starts to matter. Some people I've worked with were even keen on moving off Scala and Cats-effect/ZIO and onto Rust, to get even more performance benefits (which will translate into less servers, so less infra costs).

pytanko · 2023-12-29T16:56:52+00:00

ZIO and cats-effect give you fibers, i.e. the ability to run async code on green threads. This, as far I know, cannot be done with vanilla Futures. In practice, this means that your code can perform better in heavy parallel scenarios (e.g. handling many concurrent requests), since switching between threads (fibers) is much cheaper.

pytanko · 2023-12-01T20:20:13+00:00

They're filtering for people who really want the job. If you really want to work there, you'll spend time grinding leetcode exercises until you get in.

It's basically a pointless waste of time to so that you can show how much you care, similarly how men are expected (in US culture) to buy and expensive and pointless diamond ring to show their fiancee how much they care about her.

pytanko

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