I appear the only one here who tells someone else (relevant) about my “brilliant” ideas from walks and showers.
It’s often my wife about a thing related to our lives, but can be something work related that I share that morning with a trusted colleague or even an email to a friend.
I think the author is describing analysis paralysis. They’re right in the sense that the most complicated work (in my XP) is often demystified with a bit of engineering over white boarding and whatifing.
A long time ago I was in a fairly desperate technical situation, that to my and my lead’s minds required a stop the world, must fix or all’s lost approach.
Product wasn’t having it, and I couldn’t negotiate my way through. In the end we ignored them for the ~4 months needed to get back to systems health. We produced a retro of our findings, before and after states, etc. and consensus, from clients and even from product leadership, was that we did the right thing.
My PM ended up quitting and I permanently broke that relationship.
The best advice I ever received was: you were right. Was it worth it?
I started doing impactful things by listening to friends express a need for something (like a shopping cart for their auto parts catalog circa 1998) and just doing it (they of course offered to pay me). I had no real clue what I was doing in code at that time, and had to learn a ton to get the job done.
Looking back on my career, taking vague requirements and turning them into something useful after a hard slog through unfamiliar territory is pretty much the common thread in all my successes.
The value of benevolence of shopkeepers to their younger patrons cannot be understated. As a young kid I learned how PCs were put together from the local clone shop on San Pablo Ave in El Cerrito. I bought a 286 with 512k ram and two floppies and got to watch it be assembled and tested. Later (1989ish) I spent every moment I could at a Macintosh shop on Shattuck Ave in Berkeley playing SimCity on a then unheard of 20” color monitor (at least I recall it being that large). Today I’m at Google and just prior I was at Apple. The link is not direct, but the latter does not exist without the former (there was also a C64 prior to the 286, though without the shopkeeper story), at least in my case.
The author appears to be an EM at Booking.com. It seems unlikely that anyone at Booking would be working on SSD firmware or drivers, but a CDN seems like a reasonable assumption and also a useful place to plumb the depths of SSD implementations.
I’m surprised that folks are still considering metrics like LoC and commit frequency to measure developer productivity, even more so due to the (anecdotal, from my XP of 25 years in industry) fact that as developers gain in seniority they are typically spending more time with people than with code.
IMHO, developer productivity is best judged by the humans they work with.
as long as you're looking at the content of frequent commits I think this is valuable as it encourages smaller task sizes. If you use a PR/MR approach it also corelates with other important metrics like WIP and how long the coordination work takes. LoC is not something I was aware people are still tracking.
Principally the thing it did right, having lived through the era, is bring a real video game home with Super Mario Bros.
At the time I had a C64 and an Atari 2600, but would spend every quarter I could dig up at the arcade at the bowling alley next door playing pretty much anything, but especially Super Mario Bros.
The Nintendo was the first console to bring the arcade home and it was absolutely revolutionary.
Interesting, it never felt like an arcade game to me. When I'd go to the arcade I avoided Super Mario Bros. It didn't feel like an arcade game like Rampage.
I played it on the NES first (and it was released there before arcades, though I don't think I played until 1989 personally). But I didn't own an NES at the time, so it wasn't that I could play it for free at home.
SMB is a much better game than Rampage. I would also play Excitebike at the arcade, also not nearly as good as SMB.
I guess in an arcade I was looking for simple high score games, I wanted to dream of putting my initials on, but I also wanted to be able to walk away when I died (where in SMB if I got to 8-2 then died I'd wanna go again/continue).
I found Rampage more fun as a concept than SMB, but it doesn’t have the replay value or progression that you really want in a home video game, where SMB does.
I could never get into Excitebike. Controls always felt so awkward.
Rampage is a great game but it’s slow no matter how good you are. With most 2D mario games they nailed the level design such that you can play faster with practice and it’s fun in the same way skiing a familier run faster than last time is fun. The warp zones help replayability too.
There’s a lot in SMB that we take for granted, but I didn’t understand as a kid. The physics system made the action feel real. The the subtle animation of the coins rotating in the air (actually part of the background, interestingly) gave the levels fullness. It was a really impressive achievement compared to the competition at the time (which of course had been destroyed by the video game crash of 1983)
NES wasn’t the first home console to bring the arcade home. It wasn’t even the first console in its generation.
What it was, was the most successful console in America in that era but that was largely due to the crash in the console market over there (something that didn’t affect the rest of the world).
Yep, this is what did it for me. I was playing vs. super mario at the arcade and was amazed it was available at home. yes, it was a bowling alley arcade
