[HN Gopher] Quake related work logs (1996)
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Quake related work logs (1996)
Author : waihtis
Score : 52 points
Date : 2023-10-07 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamers.org)
| TheAlchemist wrote:
| Well, this guy didn't become a legend by accident, that's for
| sure !
|
| Reading this log, I can't stop thinking how clear things needed
| to be in his head to advance at that pace. Like he already had
| everything programmed in his mind, he was just transcribing it
| for the computer.
| beebeepka wrote:
| Isn't that what programming is like? I guess the main challenge
| is to avoid lying to yourself by downplaying stuff that is
| problematic.
| tomcam wrote:
| Your life is not completely terrible when you work log contains
| this line: - drop green slime percentage
| bergheim wrote:
| Looking at his format, I can't help but think what could have
| been if he had only used org-mode instead!
|
| iD software would never have become anything of note, of course.
| Obsessing over his emacs config, but missing C, and so becoming
| the master of the C core. We would probably never have heard of
| anything like "long lines mode".
|
| Growing up with the iD games, I am not so sure what I would
| prefer anymore. Actually I think I would have preferred the
| latter. Which is almost sad. A wild testament to emacs, to be
| sure.
|
| (yes I know these posts predate it)
| v3gas wrote:
| Is this satire
| bergheim wrote:
| It was.
| Detrytus wrote:
| Is it just me, or the work logged by Carmack for a single day
| seems like a plan for a two week sprint in Scrum, or even a full
| (3-month) Program Increment in Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)?
| neilv wrote:
| There are some sweet spots to be found in software development
| productivity.
|
| Finding them is an art/craft, and very sensitive to the
| project/company context, the people you have available, how the
| work will be distributed, etc. It includes making process
| lightweight by default, and having a good sense of when to use
| something non-lightweight.
|
| In the right circumstances, a few top "programmers" with great
| team software engineering sense, and someone representing
| product sense, unencumbered by BS, can usually wipe the floor
| with most contemporary much-larger teams.
|
| But starting off a startup by saying "We'll do Leetcode rituals
| so we know we'll hire aspiring techbros who spent their spare
| time at Stanford memorizing those, and we'll (pretend to) use
| this fashionable branded lifecycle process designed for
| companies that have no idea what they're doing but have a lot
| of warm bodies to fumble blindly through it, and ignore
| unfashionable process tools that we were confidently told don't
| work by students with zero experience based on what a professor
| with zero experience told them, and this huge list of popular
| tech we heard of and will never understand will be our stack,
| and then we can show promise to get to the next funding round
| and hire even more warm bodies..." is one way to make the road
| to finding effective expertise much longer. :)
| baal80spam wrote:
| Indeed, and of course for a full team of developers, not a
| single person.
|
| Carmack is a god.
| jsanders9 wrote:
| Is the code a mess? From the notes it looks like the code is a
| mess, but don't want to assume.
| bluedino wrote:
| https://fabiensanglard.net/quakeSource/
| noobface wrote:
| Move fast, gib stuff.
| faizshah wrote:
| I think it's more so that when you are an expert in a
| particular system and you have very little bureaucracy/overhead
| in any particular task you're able to get a lot more done.
|
| I was watching a video from one of the creators of Fallout and
| he was talking about how things that used to take a day now
| take 2 weeks for similar sort of reasons:
| https://youtu.be/LMVQ30c7TcA?si=eJm_u-i1xwttfcRL
|
| Our industry in general has added a lot of overhead and
| bureaucracy and does everything overly cautiously in comparison
| to back then. Things take exponentially longer to do in
| software development today. You can also observe this in how
| long it takes a startup to build a feature vs a FANG company.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| - No hour a day (conservatively...) lost to meetings and other
| activities that exist to generate data for managers to make
| pretty graphs out of.
|
| - No hour a day lost on PR reviews (reviewing and being
| reviewed).
|
| - No hour a day pairing on someone else's task.
|
| - No two hours lost because some part of your hellishly-complex
| stack and set of alpha-quality vendor tools decided to shit
| itself today for no reason.
|
| - No hour babysitting yesterday's code through CI and testing
| et c.
|
| - No hour a day lost to context-switching from the above and a
| dozen other distractions.
|
| - Oh look there's only an hour left in which to actually
| produce code in one eight-hour day.
| gameoverhumans wrote:
| Well, it _is_ Carmack we 're talking about here. He's well
| known as a prolific programmer prodigy ;)
|
| But also, some other things to note:
|
| * A lot of "agile" development in corporate environments is
| anything but agile because of overhead in horizontally scaling
| human gray meat (until we get neural interfacing between one
| another or something)
|
| * It was a simpler time back then. Carmack was coding against a
| much simpler architecture, with significantly fewer variants.
|
| * It was a simpler time back then. Carmack could focus on
| blitting pixels to the screen as fast as possible, rather than
| spending 6 months trying to wrap his head around Vulkan.
|
| * It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't have to worry
| about building for Windows, macOS and Linux, and iOS. And
| Android. And ...
|
| * It was a simpler time back then. Carmack didn't need to worry
| about accessibility requirements. Web service integrations.
| Digital distribution complexitities. etc...
|
| Even in the modern day there's still people who get prodigious
| amounts of work done when they can focus on doing something
| they like doing, and the stars align. A good recent example off
| the top of my head in game development is The Witness. Jonathan
| Blow + 2-3 other programmers IIRC.
| livrem wrote:
| I am not sure I would consider much of what he did very
| simple (or easy) compared to what most of us are doing today.
| The last few chapters of Michael Abrash's Black Book is about
| his work with Quake (he was involved doing some of the
| graphics code together with Carmack) and it is pretty
| hardcore low-level advanced things they were doing. Remember
| they were software rendering everything in the first version.
|
| https://github.com/neonkingfr/AbrashBlackBook
|
| And also they did pretty soon support MSDOS, Windows 95, and
| Linux (and possibly some more platforms?). In addition to
| supporting software rendering, 3Dfx, OpenGL, and possibly
| some more 3D API.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Didn't he code on Solaris or something weird in the
| workstation family and port quake over to dos? I only
| remember him having a giant CRT monitor where he'd sit and
| code for photos back in the 90s
| Narishma wrote:
| It was NextSTEP and that was for Doom. I think they
| switched to Windows NT for Quake (or was that Quake 2?),
| which is what he was working on in that pic with the
| giant CRT.
| [deleted]
| bluedino wrote:
| He was building for at least Windows and Linux, and didn't
| have OpenGL so he was doing all the 3D manually. Plus
| assembly code, hardware specific versions like Verite, had to
| handle all the raw networking code, wrote tools to work with
| assets and process levels, also wrote Quake C, encryption to
| unlock the full game on the shareware Cd...
|
| Sure, Cash, Abrash and Romero were helping out
| baz00 wrote:
| To be fair we don't have 99% of those problems and still
| manage to deliver fuck all.
| tomcam wrote:
| I like the cut of your jib
| ant6n wrote:
| Peter : Well, I generally come in at least fifteen
| minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh
| can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta
| space out for about an hour. (...) I just stare at my
| desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for
| probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a
| given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of
| real, actual, work.
|
| (...)
|
| Bob : What if - and believe me this is a hypothetical -
| but what if you were offered some kind of a stock option
| equity sharing program. Would that do anything for you?
|
| Peter : I don't know, I guess. Listen, I'm gonna go. It's
| been really nice talking to both of you guys.
|
| Bob : Absolutely, the pleasure's all on this side of the
| table, trust me.
|
| Peter : Good luck with your layoffs, all right? I hope
| your firings go really well.
| baz00 wrote:
| The point of SAFe is so that remote workers can be as
| productive as Carmack on their own side gigs during the
| ceremonial duties and meetings. I rather like it!
| livrem wrote:
| I reacted to how his way of working sounded actually agile (vs
| some method sold as agile but mostly consisting of a lot of
| processes and automatic tools to keep everyone from having any
| hope of being agile), like:
|
| > When I accomplish something, I write a * line that day.
|
| > Whenever a bug / missing feature is mentioned during the day
| and I don't fix it, I make a note of it. Some things get noted
| many times before they get fixed.
|
| > Occasionally I go back through the old notes and mark with a
| + the things I have since fixed.
| boredemployee wrote:
| >> QuakeWorld.
|
| >> The code I am developing right now is EXCLUSIVELY for internet
| play.
|
| I hope he has at least a vague idea of how many lives he changed
| because of this feature/philosophy/idea and game.
| nickjj wrote:
| I wonder how much of this was premeditated vs deciding what to
| work on based on preference or mood for the day.
|
| I've always enjoyed working on things without a dedicated
| predefined list of tasks that I'll accomplish in X time (1 day,
| week, etc.). Instead, I just pick things off the queue and
| however far I get is the result. The queue in this case could
| either be from memory or a list of ideas.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Meta-comment: it's profoundly amusing to read the surprised
| reactions to Carmack's productivity.
|
| This is what a great programmer who is a domain expert looks like
| when operating in an org structure that lets them focus on what
| they're good at. You're lucky if you get one of those three
| things, honestly.
|
| I worry that most orgs are not set up to even allow this level of
| productivity nowadays, because they're too insistent on ironing
| out the peaks of productivity to try to fix the valleys. Also,
| tech culture is still so bizarrely focused on the idol of tooling
| fixing the programming problem that we see people like Carmack
| and remember, if only vaguely, that programmer skill is still a
| very real thing.
| bboygravity wrote:
| A game is art.
|
| The most efficient tool I know to kill art and the artist's
| soul is probably Jira.
| holoduke wrote:
| Non technical product managers coming up with ideas to make
| more productive. Happy to work in a pure dev environment now.
| No sprints, no deadlines. Just goals.
| sho_hn wrote:
| You don't have to be a great programmer to be that productive.
|
| I am not, but I've also been fortunate to have periods in my
| life where I just got to pour 70-90 hours a week into a
| programming project, sometimes doing multiple 16-20 hour
| sessions over night in cafes, then taking a few days off to
| recover, with no distractions. Including commercial work, at a
| place with 20 or so other good engineers that allowed for a
| one-meeting-a-week culture because we just got each other and
| the tech stack was narrow enough to keep us compatible.
|
| The sheer amount of stuff you can get done and the level of
| satisfaction are amazing. I will always love those times.
|
| Everything you say about environment and org structure I fully
| agree with. But you don't have to be exceptional or gifted to
| benefit from an environment that trusts a creative worker to
| solve problems.
| [deleted]
| murgurglll wrote:
| Going to show this to anyone that thinks they need to build some
| optimized productivity tool stack before they can do their work.
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(page generated 2023-10-07 23:00 UTC)