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Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

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Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#41

Post by analog31 »

Scientific programming, i.e., short term problem solving, especially when working with physical measurements and experiments. The work involves a combination of programming (desktop and embedded), physics, electronics, etc. I get to choose my own tech stack (Python and Arduino), and to a large extent, my battles.

I like the fact that Mother Nature ultimately conducts my performance review. She doesn't care about tech fads, personality test scores, or office politics. She doesn't tire of proving me wrong, over and over again.

Germane to other comments in the thread, I'm aware of the salary disparities in the different castes of tech workers. On the other hand, unless someone is exceptionally disciplined and motivated, it takes something more than pay to propel a career.

While in college, I had a summer internship in a computer facility. My present job is in a building with a large team of devs. I get to see what they actually do.

I've wondered to myself if I'd be happy enough as a developer to do it for as long as I've done my present job, or if I'd just get bored and burn out, or start to misbehave.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#42

Post by mysterydip »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #20
mysterydip wrote: post #12

Early 90s 3D engines. Raycasting, sprite scaling, SNES mode 7, voxels, early flight/space sims.

I see a lot on this lately. Why is that? Just hobby or there is positive economical return?

There was a short period of time where software rendering engines were able to do some interesting things before hardware rendering took over and they all died out. There is still untapped potential in a lot of the techniques, which is fun exploring.

I'm using them for a game I will be releasing. I think very few games these days regardless of engine used or graphical style has a chance of a net positive return, so that part doesn't bother me.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#44

Post by sbf501 »

Whenever I get bored (rarely these days) I like to write path-finding & annealing algorithms. I start with a super simple ray-tracing framework I first wrote in the 1990's for visualization, and then I play around with things like gravity and electromagnetic repulsion / attraction. My favorite thing to do is watch a million charged spheres distribute themselves on a weird surface obeying gravity and electromagnetics, and then have another sphere try to navigate through them. It's pointless but satisfying. I'm sure Blender and Processing and all the new fancy tools can do it better, but I understand every single line of code, so I feel like it is something I made for me.

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#45

Post by nottorp »

Tbh your favorite niche will stop becoming favorite when you know enough about it.

When I was bitbanging wires to talk (in a simple way) to another chip the first few times it was exciting. Now it's open schematics, figure out what to connect, do simple tests, get it to work.

On the other hand, if you don't do your favorite niche for your day job and you have limited time to work on it, it can keep you entertained for years.

Things I consider fun to do but haven't ever done:

- my own programming language

- a non trivial game from start to finish

- some kind of database/knowledge storage thing (this is fuzzy)

- other stuff related to carrying bits across wires and machines (even more fuzzy, but I do seem to like moving people's bits around)

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#46

Post by kortex »

As of recent I've been weirdly fascinated with codecs, serialization protocols, file formats, and the like. It scratches that low-level hacking itch (I spent most of my professional programming in web dev space) without as much commitment to electronics (used to be super big into arduino but I find that's harder to pick up and put down).

I've started hacking on my own container format (yeah, I know, xkcd927), after finding it super frustrating to embed arbitrary time-synched data streams into mp4/matroska/ogg/etc. Also it bugs me how crusty, complicated, and arcane mp4 is, and at the same time, mastroska and ogg are weirdly opaque given how they are supposed to be open standards.

If anyone is curious, here's my container format I've been developing: https://github.com/xkortex/sito

Re: Ask HN: What's your favorite programmer niche?

#50

Post by tjpnz »

Obscure operating systems and programming languages. I've spent a fair amount of time recently deep diving Temple OS and Holy C which a large chunk of the former was written in. I don't care much for Holy C but I have learned things reading through Terry Davis' implementation of it.
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