Lazy iteration, potential benefit
At this point, most people are familiar with the deferred evaluation model of LINQ, using ‘yield’ statements. Since this is new for some teams at work, there’s been a question of when is it appropriate. Deferred evaluation is of most benefit when there is some chance the entire Enumerable...
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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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Hello San Francisco and GDC 2011!
I’ll be giving a talk as part of the TA Bootcamp on Tuesday, entitled “Ending the Culture War: Building a Better Pipeline by Uniting Tech Art and Engineering”. I’ll have the slides up after the talk, with full text narration (as I did last year and will continue to...
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SmartBear’s Code Collaborator for Code Reviews
We’ve been using SmartBear’s Code Collaborator at BWA on the engineering side for a few months and I think it has worked out real well. I recently forced it upon Tech Art and we’re seeing immediate gains and I’d highly recommend the product. The big problem we had (on...
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Bill Gates on great programmers
Excerpt from an interview with Bill Gates in the 1986 book Programmers at Work: I think after the first three or four years, it’s pretty cast in concrete whether you’re a good programmer or not. After a few years, you may know more about managing large projects and personalities,...
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Fixing things is easy, but you must be careful about what you fix
On NPR/KUT a few months ago, I was listening to a short story called ‘The Fix’ by Percival Everett. It was about a character Sherman Olney, who could fix anything- refrigerators, car engines, relationships- even bring people back to life. When asked by his employer (the owner of some...
