Maybe I missed it but was there an estimate of when the game will be available?
Starfighter, Summer 2015
71–80 of 112 posts
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#72I'm surprised tptacek delegated the AVR emulator to elptacek, rather than write it himself, since he had already done the MSP430 emulator.
On another topic, presumably the handheld devices for traders and gophers have a UI of some kind. Has this UI actually been implemented? And if so, what kind of UI is it, and will players need to interact with it? Or will players just be getting down and dirty with hacking the device in a debugger? I ask because I wonder how accessible this game will be for blind people. Of course, you may argue that the devices and software in the real world of stock trading probably aren't accessible either. And depending on what kind of UI the emulated handheld devices have, the OCR features or plugins of some popular screen readers may be enough to get by.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#73From the post it sounds like prop trading firms / hedge funds and other finance companies are a big target demographic for Starfighter to make placements at... From Thomas's background in Chicago I predict the following firms as early customers: http://www.spottradingllc.com/ http://www.belvederetrading.com/ http://www.towerhilltrading.com/
Wow, THT! I was their Director of IT around 2007-2010. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were.
But then again I am probably the only one who is disappointed over this announcement - the game sounds really boring to me.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but it's all Golang, so you know 2/3rds of it is the same list management and sort code specialized for all our different structs, AM I RIGHT? I kill me.
Then, why Golang? Are there other things that make this duplication worth?
Golang makes total sense for the kind of programmer who wants everything to be there on the screen in front of them. It’s like C in that regard - write code, the computer does what the code says, programmer is happy: No constructors, no destructors, no exceptions, no weirdness
But C has weird bits & odd corner cases. C isn’t type safe. C requires you to do all your own memory management. C is in fact full of landmines for the ordinary programmer (which is all of us, even the very best on a bad day) to step on inadvertently. What if you could have a language that acted like C, but was type safe, did do memory management for you, and had a decent standard library so you didn’t have to spend time writing yet another linked list implementation? Oh, and the one true concurrency scheme (Hoare’s communicating sequential processes) is built right in to the language, so you can write type-safe asynchronous systems without tedious boilerplate.
That language is Golang. Like C, it’s a wysiwyg language, unlike C it’s much harder to shoot your own foot off with it.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, THT! I was their Director of IT around 2007-2010. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were. But then again I am probably the only one who is disappointed over this announcement - the game sounds really boring to me.
> Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were.
This is generally the case at most places where software development is done, even when the software is the product.
For example, as any developer working at an "enterprise software" shop -- despite being the "producers", you're still beholden to (and less important than) the sales folks.
Not saying that's right or wrong, just that that is how it is.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh don't worry, we'll get people's hands dirty with FIX, too, but making things accessible to web developers in their usual toolchains seemed like a good call for Chapter 1. Especially since I had never personally worked with FIX before and we had a slightly aggressive timeline.
I feel sorry for you having to use it. Especially the XML version. Stay strong! Fun fact, the SOH delimiter character renders as a smiley face in some terminals. Some of the proprietary protocols are fixed width which makes them so much simpler to parse than FIX.
Fun fact: there are virtually no libraries or frameworks that recognize SOH is a radioactive metacharacter.
Hm, maybe shouldn't have given that one away. Oh well, people will forget before we launch.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#77Hmmm, personally, I have rather mixed feelings about this. I'd really like to be excited, but so far, I'm not. (And, on a somewhat tangential note, also I'm fairly surprised not to see any voices similar to mine here in the comments; am I the only one? hard to believe; or maybe others like me just shrug and don't bother to write? sounds more probable, to me at least.) I tried to analyze my thoughts on that; I'll try…
We're appealing to a much wider audience than most CTFs, but we certainly aren't trying to appeal to everyone. You don't have to worry if none of this sounds fun to you; that doesn't make anything wrong with you, or us. We're just another thing that exists!
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#78Looking forward to the list of recommended literature promised in the previous announcement.
It's coming.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow, THT! I was their Director of IT around 2007-2010. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Why would a developer work in such a place? I imagine you would be forced to be all professional yet always play second fiddle to the traders, no matter great your skills were. But then again I am probably the only one who is disappointed over this announcement - the game sounds really boring to me.
Because electronic trading networks are like the Internet of Money --- literally. They're a pretty thrilling piece of technology to play with.
Second fiddle, depends where you're working. Like everything else, there are crappy shops and there are amazing ones.
Re: Starfighter, Summer 2015
#80I'm surprised tptacek delegated the AVR emulator to elptacek, rather than write it himself, since he had already done the MSP430 emulator. On another topic, presumably the handheld devices for traders and gophers have a UI of some kind. Has this UI actually been implemented? And if so, what kind of UI is it, and will players need to interact with it? Or will players just be getting down and dirty with hacking the dev…
What things work well for blind users, and what things don't?