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Read Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book for the story of how the original Quake came to life. You'll get an appreciation for John Carmack's ability to thoroughly research widely varying solutions to a problem, quickly create production-quality implementations of the promising ones, and even more quickly abandon the dead ends. The result is this almost boring, seemingly linear progression toward a final product that seems obvious in hindsight, yet it represents a leap forward the way Quake did in the mid-1990s compared to other FPSes at the time. I don't know many other public stories of individual engineers who can span both the very cutting edge of research and the practicalities of shipping real commercial software.
https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book
> easily said by someone who spends a lot of time on HN instead of building things.
Heh. My "life's work": https://ardour.org ... My "previous life's work": http://amazon.com/
Being an inconsequential gimmick isn't about implementation, it's about semantics, relevance and utility. Only the last of these is really impacted at all by engineering, and even then, the engineering component doesn't matter if the thing just isn't useful.