Hello CoRecursive newsletter subscriber!
It's December now, and I have a new episode:
https://corecursive.com/doomed-to-fail-with-burger-becky/
My Guest, Becky Heineman, shares the story of porting DOOM to the 3DO console.
I grew up in this era and remember playing Wolfenstein on my home computer for hours and hours. I couldn't run DOOM for some reason, but it was installed on the computers in the computer lab at school and we played Doom multiplayer in typing class occasionally.
Games initially got me into computers when I was a young teen, but I quickly switched to tinkering with the computers and found real fun in building things on my own. Becky's path toward game development starts in a different era, with Apple IIs and Atari 2600s, but, interestingly, she follows a similar approach, going from playing games to pirating games to developing games.
To me, programming always felt a lot like playing with legos, building things and being proud of what you built and sometimes I feel like that feeling gets lots once you get a job, and have a continuous line of tickets to implement. It's strange to think about the games that brought you joy being part of an unfun death march project, but that is precisely the story that Becky has to share. It turns out that mismanaged projects are a fact of life, even when porting a legendary game.
Video/ Talks:
Last weekend I spoke at a Python conference about my efforts to write an efficient merging algorithm in python by dropping down to C. The conference talk isn't up yet, but I recorded a stand-alone version for Earthly's youtube channel called "Beating TimSort".
Recording videos is a skill I don't have, but I'm hoping to improve at it. I've learned from podcasting that the amount of time you can spend on editing is infinite, so the video I recorded for TimSort has no edits. Better not to open that pandora's box until I absolutely have to.
I'm scheduled to be at confoo in Montreal this February, but that and the just completed python conference are the only conferences that have accepted my talks so far. I'm trying to improve my public speaking and presenting skills, so if you know of any conferences, you think I would be a good guest for, please let me know.
Writing
I also wrote an article about BullShit software projects after having my attention drawn to how many software projects never make it out into the real world. And before that, in early November, I made a proof of concept 'container runtime' that only used the UNIX chroot command.
That is my update for the past month. Checkout the podcast episode and let me know what you think,
Adam