pcestrada

Just joined a new team as a senior dev last fall and went through this. I simply worked my ass off the first couple of months and asked a lot of questions and banged out some very high quality initial commits to make a strong first impression. Have a zen mind/open mind, things will be different and you may not care for some of the approaches taken. Play the long game and gradually make suggestions and changes as you get to know the landscape. My initial feedback from management was very positive, so this approach worked for me.

This was a wonderful book, it really helped lift the veil on how more complicated things were written in code for me. Also, I remember I was at the mall with my uncle and he offered to buy me a gift. I went straight to the bookstore and picked out this book. He was surprised that I picked out a book on programming, and rewarded me with some extra cash after purchasing the book.

Fingers crossed that you tackle a Quake Black Book at some point.

This is an excellent book, and real breaks down the math into bite-sized chunks that can be easily consumed.

Folks might also enjoy the Nantucket PC game on steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/621220/Nantucket/

he was too inept to start war

I can attest to many mortgage payments successfully made thanks to Java.

Can you imagine having to learn all this just to make a connection to a database, process some data, and then persist it somewhere?

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes"

-Dijkstra

Economic hardship does not kill those under 35. You need to focus on the social good.

Younger people die from the flu too. This is several times more dangerous.

This appears to be a destabilizing first strike weapon.

Fantastic example of fog of war. Nice write-up!

My father was diagnosed with lung cancer 4 years ago. He is on his third round of chemo. I recommend reading "The Emperor of all Maladies" for an insightful book on cancer. Even though medicine has made great progress fighting cancer, the scorched earth approach is what most of these treatments come down to.

Not very useful at all. Few apps take advantage of it. The lack of a physical Escape key is also very annoying.

Makes my lower back pain worse. I also can't get in the 'zone' as easily. I have a powered standing desk and sit at it 90-95% of the time.

I keep a journal using Google Docs. Whenever I make an entry, I have the date and a brief summary of any interesting thoughts related to the project, URL links, etc. I always keep a TODO list of what to work on next. This helps immensely when picking up the project again after a while to figure out what I was working on.

Log the hell out of the code.

I'm currently working my way through this book Artificial Intelligence for Games [1] and am finding it very approachable for someone with no background in AI.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Artificial-Intelligence-Games-Ian-Mill...

How did you convince management to let you use Clojure? Some of the devs where I am are interested, but I suspect management will be quite hesitant to embrace a new language.

I'd rather program in C# in Unity than C++ for UE4.

I work at Kiva Systems as a software engineer, located north of Boston. We do a lot of work with robotics and Amazon scale web service development and we are hiring. Check it out at: http://www.kivasystems.com/careers-at-kiva/

Happy to talk about it further. Email me at pestrada AT kivasystems.com

Use your smart phone to record yourself.

This reminds me of a quote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and your research"

``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Wow... another multi-million user platform has just been born.

A person's reputation is an important factor in evaluating what they say.

I have 3 years doing full time Flex development. Have yet to see these problems. We deploy to Windows/Linux and Flash Player has been the closest to write once/run anywhere that we've seen. We have nothing but good things to say about Flex development.

Sure you might be able to understand something given enough time and guidance. But to me a super programmer is someone who is able to make that leap and create something novel, useful, and valuable. For example, John Carmack, who many would describe as a super programmer, showed the rest of the game industry what could be done with 2.5D in Doom, and later commodity 3D hardware with Quake. You can certainly review his code since it's open source and understand it, but how many people could have independently done what he did when he did it? Not many I would wager.

Rules of engagement may force the use of close-in air combat maneuvering (ACM). During the Vietnam War, the US had more advanced, long range missiles but political considerations forced the pilots to visually identify targets before firing.

Also, against a technically sophisticated adversary such as the Russians or Chinese, the initial exchange of beyond visual range (BVR) missiles will most likely leave a number of aircraft alive. The Russian have the PAK FA stealth fighter in development and the Chinese J-37 stealth fighter had it's maiden flight last year. Stealth technology only makes it more likely that more aircraft survive the first volley. At typical combined closure speeds, there will be only one BVR exchange before ACM begins.

It's also very dangerous to be flying around the battlefield with your radar turned on as everyone else will immediately detect it and mark you as a target as you broadcast your range, speed, and bearing to the world. Typically target acquisition is by other means, such as AWACs aircraft or ground control that guides you into a high Probability Kill (PK) position.

RIM will become another case study MBA students read about when discussing the Innovator's Dilemma.