81–90 of 109 posts
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Apples and oranges.
How so? The GOOG exec story is about how to get rich by climbing the "Corporate Ladder", while Persson's way is to become successful by going indie and producing games people want. The interesting fact is that their wealth are comparable number-wise.
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How so? The GOOG exec story is about how to get rich by climbing the "Corporate Ladder", while Persson's way is to become successful by going indie and producing games people want. The interesting fact is that their wealth are comparable number-wise.
I guess I wasn't really focusing on the wealth as it seems to me to be only mentioned in an effort to get people's attention. I think both stories are fascinating.
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Reminds me of Zed Shaw's Learn Code The Hard Way approach: > You must type each of these exercises in, manually. If you copy and paste, you might as well just not even do them. The point of these exercises is to train your hands, your brain, and your mind in how to read, write, and see code. If you copy-paste, you are cheating yourself out of the effectiveness of the lessons.
When I was 14, I started learning C from a book that built around this premise. I think it was called "Type & Learn C." It worked - by the end of the summer I was a somewhat proficient C programmer. I still think it's kind of amazing how such simple advice can be so effective. I often find that when I'm struggling to grok a new language or framework, that I've forgotten to hand-type at least a few examples.
The part of the body that learns how to program[1] doesn't speak English. You hear it even in the metaphors programmers use: code smell, this "feels" like a recursive problem, "listen to your code," etc.
That means to learn as quickly as you can you want as many parts of your body involved -- the English-speaking part, your muscles, your eyes, your memories of all the times you've made a stupid mistake only to have it cause you hours of frustration down the road, etc.
[1]: Really, the part of the body that learns anything doesn't speak English. English is just the data exchange format. ;)
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This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
I suppose I can't really speak for everybody but as a 20-something the story a lot of my friends and I had in common was programming our TI calculators. The language was simple (some might say...basic ba dum chh ), it was easy to share programs with friends as text or via link and you had a built in packed audience of folks in classes that thought the things you figured out how to do were really cool. We started with…
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…
This story is incredibly common amongst my age group (40) in tech. What is the common story amongst those that are 30? 20?
Compared to the other story of a $100M GOOG Exec, this is a story I really like, as a programmer.
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When I was 14, I started learning C from a book that built around this premise. I think it was called "Type & Learn C." It worked - by the end of the summer I was a somewhat proficient C programmer. I still think it's kind of amazing how such simple advice can be so effective. I often find that when I'm struggling to grok a new language or framework, that I've forgotten to hand-type at least a few examples.
Here's my current working hypothesis. The part of the body that learns how to program[1] doesn't speak English. You hear it even in the metaphors programmers use: code smell, this "feels" like a recursive problem, "listen to your code," etc. That means to learn as quickly as you can you want as many parts of your body involved -- the English-speaking part, your muscles, your eyes, your memories of all the times you'v…
What is the longevity of Minecraft? As a social sandbox game, people can play for a long time. We have a habit of treating games like movies, good for one time through, and perhaps most are. But what if some games are more like Legos, playable for years? Instead of a franchise (King's Quest I, King's Quest II, ...), what if there is some other extendable model, like buying a new Lego kit? I have no idea, but Minecraf…
> What is the longevity of Minecraft? There's an unofficial modding API and thousands of mods [1], some of which are extremely sophisticated. For instance, "Red Power" [2] includes an in-game 6502-based computer for which the author wrote a Forth interpreter that can be used to control in-game objects, and somebody else has embedded a Lua interpreter that can do similar things, IIRC. There are also dozens of user-cre…
> Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while, I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what t…