Readit NewsImpossible commented on I Am Seriously Considering Going Back to Desktop Computers (2020) misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/... · Posted by u/ivanvas
Oppressive vendor practices aside, I just don't get the laptop fixation some people have, in general.
I find it extremely hard to be productive on a laptop; the form factor is entirely wrong for concentration. Small screen, mushy crappy keyboard with a bad layout, etc. My desktop has a large monitor and a mechanical keyboard and a mouse and without that stuff, and an upright posture and focus, I can't get in the zone.
So, yes, I can hook a laptop up to all those things, but then it's just a desktop anyways. I can see the advantages for traveling, but for the last two years I naturally have not done that.
... But the worst thing about a laptop was while I was working from home there was just always the temptation to sluff off to a couch or bed and zone out. I couldn't program in that posture, but I could goof off.
Since quitting my $job and turning in my work laptop my coding productivity has gone up.
You'll pry my workstation from my cold dead hands, etc. etc.
I always have a desktop computer and mostly can only do real work on desktop (graphics/VR/game programmer). Laptops are nice for portability so I always try to have one or two available. Because of my role my jobs have always provided one in the office, but I keep a personal one for gaming and side projects/learning.
Almost every alternative you can imagine has been tried. Lots of interviews, few interviews, take home projects, pair programming, hire fast fire fast, trial periods and on and on and on.
All of these are used in the wild at various companies. Maybe these companies are entirely staffed by subpar engineers, but FAANG style whiteboarding is extremely gameable, especially if you know someone in the inside already, but even if you don't and leetcode enough.
Most ICs are pretty well insulated from this, because if they understood what went on at calibration a lot of good contributors would become pretty bitter.
I had a lot of managers and higher level ICs explain calibration and rage quit (although it was long overdue) after an unfairly low review. There were extreme politics happening at the time that the current ED laid out to me in an exit conversation, and most of it came into play. I should have made way more money off of my contributions than I did but didn't play politics, and honestly, given my role and position could not. I was a resource and not a player:)
Impossible commented on Catching Native Apps mjtsai.com/blog/2022/01/1... · Posted by u/bangonkeyboard
Figma is a C++ application compiled to webasm that paints to a blank canvas for the majority of it's usage. It's about as 'web' as the unity game engine compiling to web. In development they compile to a macOS app and use instruments to profile it.
The platform is still web, even if it's not using HTML and CSS. The success of figma has lead to a lot of start ups targeting the web as there main platform, but using WASM (C++ or Rust) and WebGL (soon WebGPU). This makes sense in creative tools, I think. We're also starting to see tools that run on the server and stream video to the browser.
GameMaker has gotten pretty professionalized at this point, but back in the day I think it was a good entry point, with decent non-code workflows to get the basics going and a smooth on-ramp to adding behaviour code as needed.
I don't know what fills the hole that used to be platforms like ZZT and MegaZeux, though. Maybe it's Minecraft and Roblox that are the modern outlets for that kind of creativity.
HN tends to over use "boilerplate" as Pico-8 has zero boilerplate and is super minimal. Your post is no exception. Core gameplay code is not boilerplate and Pico-8 is not a game engine in that sense.
Playdate has Pulp, which does include built in collision, dialog systems etc and is inspired by Bitsy. Pulp has it's own (optional) scripting language and is specifically designed as an accessible game making tool. Even the Playdate Lua and C SDKs have more gameplay functionality than pico-8 though, including a simple game object model, collisions, animation, etc