A nice chicken and artichoke dish for dinner, a movie, some reading, and some recording of a podcast. Oh look, that's my whole evening, that worked out splendidly.
I haven't hugged anyone today. Most days I don't.
Whatever engine gets you as close to realizing your vision in the resources you're able to commit. I probably had the most fun working in the engine we wrote for Starfighter, because I knew it intimately and the three senior programmers on it all had a similar philosophy of how to build code at the time, though we've all evolved in different directions I'm sure.
I do.
How much time do you have?
LOL, I had never considered that he might be a good match for a 50-ish Eugene Debs but now that you mention it...
Must have been challenging because I'm not a people person? :) Ha. Yes, in general, being a lead is often more about developing the people you're leading but also about providing technical direction and vision, and acting as a technical sounding board for what the team hopes to achieve. The people aspect of it is one I take very seriously.
It has changed to the most degree with the introduction of concurrent programming, with the addition of GPUs and the PS2’s architecture at the beginning of my career. That’s probably the biggest single change but it’s an enormous one - in a way, you’re often working on problems that at one time would have been problems for operating systems programmers. And concurrent programming is significantly harder than single process programming. So in that sense it’s harder.
Longer/shorter is a tougher thing. It takes longer to make the AAA games, but they’re also bigger (and have the challenge described above). Apples to apples? I can code up Asteroids or something in an hour or so, in C - but I don’t have to think about the hardware to do so (and of course, the design is established).
I wouldn’t begin to know how to answer that question, which probably places me at the low end of the scale.
I have a number of books I’d like to have written. I don’t know if I can quiet my inner critic long enough to get out a first draft. All are fiction.
