Blog of Rob Galanakis (@robgalanakis)

Archive for March, 2011

Great men don’t swaddle themselves in warm blankets

During a discussion today about some necessary-but-scary infrastructural changes, someone (a Lead, mind you) described the status quo as a warm, comforting blanket he wasn’t ready to leave. Horrified, I replied: Great men don’t swaddle themselves in warm blankets.

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Naive Programming and Multithreading

I on almost weekly basis, I run into some example of naive programming regarding threading. Generally they have the following in common: 1- Uses Thread.Start 2- Show no understanding of CPU-vs-IO bound operations 3- Show no understanding of how a computer manages threads Take this psuedocode for some widely-used...

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Video interview with me at GDC2011

Here’s a video interview I did with Bill Crosbie, a member of the IGDA’s Education SIG. He was interviewing tech artists at GDC to get ideas for a curriculum the IGDA can give to educators, to help grow and raise awareness of the tech art discipline. The last part...

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GDC Slides/Notes online: Ending the Culture War

I’ve uploaded my GDC slides (with full notes/narration). Here’s the link: Rob Galanakis: Ending the Culture War, GDC 2011 TA Bootcamp (PDF slides/notes) The main point of the presentation is understanding how to get your Tech Art and Tools Engineering teams to work together effectively (and why they aren’t...

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GDC 2011 Wrapup

So, GDC 2011 was fantastic. Really, truly fantastic, on an industry, discipline, and personal level. This was the largest GDC yet, with something like 18,000 attendees and 600+ speakers. Our Tech Art Bootcamp was a huge success. Almost filled room from 10am to 6pm on Tuesday. Incredible. The Tech...

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