The most important decisions are non-technical.
I am puzzled from time to time with questions about a passing note I made in 2010 about the fact that I no longer program in order to earn money. It's true. I have not worked as a full-time programmer since 2003. The short version of these questions is “Why?”. A longer version - “Listen, you run a super-technical blog about programming and it looks like you know all these things, but don't you really want to work as a programmer?”.
The answer to both versions of this problem is that I came to the conclusion that the most important decisions are not technical. This is an unsubstantiated and bold statement, so let me explain.
In the summer of 1993, I responded to an ad in a newspaper that searched for “hackers for 6502” (which seemed funny to me; Pentium was released that same year) and got a job at a small company near Seattle where they wrote games for Super Nintendo. I was involved in game development before that, but then I worked alone in my parents' room.
')
The first game for SNES, on which I worked, was a platformer on the plot of "Tarzan" in agreement with Edgar Burroughs (he was not associated with the Disney film, which was released six years later). It was fun to do so in order for tropical fish to move with shoals and set the behavior of animals, such as monkeys and birds. It was a great place to work: about a dozen programmers sat together in one big hall.
The only problem was that the game was definitely terrible. She was just a jumble of clichés from other platformers, and it was not fun. All software tricks, and optimization, and improving the behavior of monkeys, it seems, could not change the situation. To actually fix the game, it was necessary to rethink the idea at the level of the entire project. As a “hacker for 6502”, I was not able to make such decisions.
Although it's fun to discuss whether an application should be implemented in Ruby or Clojure, write beautiful and concise code, learn how far you can go with purely functional programming, these are all minor issues compared to the definition of user experience, development of a user-friendly interface, maintaining simplicity and clarity in the project, confidence that you are doing something that is really convenient for the people for whom it is done. These are increasingly important decisions.
And what happened to that game about Tarzan? Despite the fact that she received a review in Nintendo Power, the publisher made the wise decision to pay for the year spent on development and submit the completed project to the archive.
The answer to both versions of this problem is that I came to the conclusion that the most important decisions are not technical. This is an unsubstantiated and bold statement, so let me explain.
In the summer of 1993, I responded to an ad in a newspaper that searched for “hackers for 6502” (which seemed funny to me; Pentium was released that same year) and got a job at a small company near Seattle where they wrote games for Super Nintendo. I was involved in game development before that, but then I worked alone in my parents' room.
')
The first game for SNES, on which I worked, was a platformer on the plot of "Tarzan" in agreement with Edgar Burroughs (he was not associated with the Disney film, which was released six years later). It was fun to do so in order for tropical fish to move with shoals and set the behavior of animals, such as monkeys and birds. It was a great place to work: about a dozen programmers sat together in one big hall.
The only problem was that the game was definitely terrible. She was just a jumble of clichés from other platformers, and it was not fun. All software tricks, and optimization, and improving the behavior of monkeys, it seems, could not change the situation. To actually fix the game, it was necessary to rethink the idea at the level of the entire project. As a “hacker for 6502”, I was not able to make such decisions.
Although it's fun to discuss whether an application should be implemented in Ruby or Clojure, write beautiful and concise code, learn how far you can go with purely functional programming, these are all minor issues compared to the definition of user experience, development of a user-friendly interface, maintaining simplicity and clarity in the project, confidence that you are doing something that is really convenient for the people for whom it is done. These are increasingly important decisions.
And what happened to that game about Tarzan? Despite the fact that she received a review in Nintendo Power, the publisher made the wise decision to pay for the year spent on development and submit the completed project to the archive.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/143428/
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