Reboot Develop 2017 - Jonathan Blow, Thekla Inc. / Making Game Programming Less Terrible

Our computers (meaning the whole of software and hardware) are extremely primitive, their culture soaked in insanity and in general they are perfectly hateable. It's not my choice to have a temper tantrum about it because they were already shitty when I got here. But what's on my mind isn't how hateable computers are; it's how loveable something shitty can be as long as it's shinier and bigger than last year. "I'm not sure most programmers even know what makes things slow anymore" - [VIDEO]

> Suppose during my regular game development everyday life I've installed Photoshop recently and I want a look at a screenshot of the game - someone reported a problem or something. > So I double-click on the thing ... one ... two ... three ... four ... five ... six ... it's about seven seconds before I can actually see the image. [...] > So that's really slow and I'm going to talk about that for a bit, but there's an element of severe irony to this which is that as soon as I double click this thing within one second it draws an image and it's a pretty high resolution interesting image. It's just not the image that I care about. > So obviously it's not hard to start a process and draw an image on the screen in much less than seven seconds. They just don't manage that. > Now. I gave a speech a year ago that started this same way. That was 2016. It's now 2017 and of course a new version of Photoshop has come out and of course what will align directly with my point in the next few slides: they've made it worse. And the great way in which they've made it worse is: say there's some operation that you want to do maybe once in a while like create a new image... So I'm going to go to file, new ... Urghh. And that menu takes - it probably takes about a second to come up. > And you might think "Oh, well, you know it was just all these assets were cold or something.. Maybe they come off the hard drive. It'll be faster next time." And it's like: "Well, let's test that out. Nope." Like ev

Have you ever considered what's making you not enjoy programming anymore? Journalling your day-to-day might help. Here's one example that I found that really screws with people not enjoying programming. If you have a career, chances are you're going through rules/bullshit(ie. code standards, needlessly large codebases) made up by other programmers within your organization and that's making you not enjoy programming as much - in contrast to when you were younger and only needed to get things working. On the bright side, there are ways to handle it. While I don't recommend going YOLO and willfully breaking all the rules or even quitting without a plan, I do recommend trying to find some other outlet/hobby that you enjoy after work hours. You could also try to contribute to people also trying to make programming less friction-ish. [VIDEO]