Early 90s 3D engines. Raycasting, sprite scaling, SNES mode 7, voxels, early flight/space sims.
Yeah, software rendering engines were works of art.
Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
21–30 of 112 posts
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#22Trying to make a program that a 93 year old grandmother could extend herself.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#23Tinkering with microcontrollers is probably the most satisfying, because it really challenges you to understand exactly what is going on at all times, right down to the electrical level. Developing for retro hardware can be fun too, for similar reasons.
>Tinkering with microcontrollers is probably the most satisfying Not so satisfying when seeing the pay-grade compared to other CS fields.
Do you expect your spare-time programming projects to fall in a specific salary range?
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#24Zero-Knowledge Cryptography
P2P protocols, networking in general
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#25Tinkering with microcontrollers is probably the most satisfying, because it really challenges you to understand exactly what is going on at all times, right down to the electrical level. Developing for retro hardware can be fun too, for similar reasons.
I’m really glad to hear this. Building hardware for the real world amplified the power of software incredibly.
PS…we’re hiring firmware engineers to bring hardware to life.
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#26Learning random tools in devops
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#27My favorite subgenre is when my commit looks like: 3 files changed, 35 insertions(+), 562 deletions(-)
I was once added to a team to help improving their code base. At the end of the project they made an overview how many lines each of the team members added to the code base. Mine was negative. :)
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#28Test automation in the browser without use of third party libraries or frameworks. Just a test runner in Node sending tests to the browser in localhost that execute user events in the DOM
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#29Lately I've been playing around with learning type theory and writing parsers and langauges.
But I seem to gravitate towards writing code to decode various file formats. Over the years I've reverse engineered Apple Notes database, written code to read the realm database backing Craft.app, code to read couchdb files, lucene files, git pack files, sqlite databases (I have js code that runs queries against raw database files), etc.
I'm also interested in compression and cryptography. (Implementing toy systems to learn how stuff works.)
Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?
#30Disassembling DOS malware. I also like 80s/90s game (engine) development as well :)