[HN Gopher] Quake related work logs (1996) ___________________________________________________________________ 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. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-10-07 23:00 UTC)