speeder

2 months agodiscuss

Finding crappy jobs is easy. Finding a decent job is proving challenging.

Crappy I don't mean only job in bad companies, but sometimes job in good companies but a bad situation or project. For example one of my recent-ish experiences was in an excellent company but the project was pure firefighting, the people that knew the thing well were leaving, and the company policies were getting in the way of the project, so I got hired to "replace" people, this just sucked and in the end didn't work.

speeder

2 months agodiscuss

  Location: Porto, Portugal
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Lua, C, C++, GameDev, Python, know some embedded and some cloud stuff.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
  Email: [email protected]

Looking for C or C++ roles. (or similar). GameDev and Embedded at my first choices but any work with these technologies is fine. I am hoping to find work where I am NOT firefighting or replacing someone that quit. I want time to do onboarding properly, learn the job, and do a great job.

My wife will give birth in some days, so I can't start working right now, but a new job will be very welcome.

I also did DevRel in the past and recently interviewed some DevRel positions, made me realize I am also suitable for that and willing to work with that.

I have a lot of experience with iOS and Android, but been some time since I worked with these.

speeder

4 months agodiscuss

I am from Brazil, and there is a famous politician there that has the non-official slogan of "Steals but Does". He is Paulo Maluf. "Everyone" knows he is corrupt. But people vote for him anyway, because he get things done, and he doesn't engage in certain kinds of corruption.

That is the problem, how you get corruption to go the way you want?

Lots of politicians see Paulo Maluf, and think they can imitate him, that they will be beloved by the public and steal money somehow and line their own pockets, except those are too self-serving or too incompetent to pull that off properly, so they steal in ways that go against the public.

So for example in one city where I lived, one mayor stole the money from the kids lunch, resulting in hungry kids. Another mayor stole ludicrous amounts of money from garbage collection services, the result is that the city ended with debts in the billions while being a tiny city (it has 100k people, yet has debts bigger than cities with millions of people).

Paulo Maluf meanwhile built lots of useful infrastructure that is still in use. (also hilariously he used to brag a lot using the phrase "Maluf that did it!", one time some comedic journalists went to a bridge opening, and asked him who did the bridge, he replied: "Maluf didn't do this bridge. But he did the two roads the bridge are connecting, so there is no bridge without Maluf!")

speeder

4 months agodiscuss

I worked on a project where having code formatting used was massively useful. The project had 10k source files, many of them having several thousand lines, everything was C++ and good chunks of code were written brilliantly and the rest was at least easy to understand.

speeder

4 months agodiscuss

Yes that is the name.

But bafflingly to me, almost zero of my coworkers seemed to be aware of it. They would just get the seemly weird orders from above and would execute them, without figuring out the end goal, and this does result into some bad software engineering (because people don't know the end goal they don't know what they can optimize, so they just don't).

speeder

4 months agodiscuss

I worked on BMW infotainment for a time. My opinions are my own obviously, I don't even work at BMW anymore.

So, when I was working, I found the decisions regarding the infotainment mind boggling, to me they made zero sense, until I found some random documents deep in the BMW intranet, where I found the logic of it all: The focus was actually increasing the car range, so for example instead of having one infotainment dedicated hardware, one for the doors, one for the brakes, etc... now the cars have the least amount of computers as possible, located in the locations that result in the least wires as possible, with the goal of saving weight. Because of this, the software layer now had to deal with extra virtualizations, software that originally was to run on a specific microcontroller and do a specific task, and communicated with other parts by wire, now shares a generalized CPU with many other software, and communicate by virtual machines sending messages to each other.

Marvelous stuff from the point of mechanical engineering, indeed results in lighter car and less parts. But the end result for the user? It is mind bogglingly bad, several VMs running on top of each other, everything is slow, the Infotainment instead of being just Infotainment now do several other things.

I had written some of the surprising non-Infotainment stuff the Infotainment do, but that probably would cross into violating NDAs territory, so better not. Just let's say the Infotainment has to meet some non-entertainment related EU regulations.

speeder

6 months agodiscuss

I am in Portugal right now. You know something we don’t have often here? Garages.

For example in my neighborhood most cars are parallel parked, people are living in centuries old houses converted into high density condos, there are no garages.

So what is more practical, charging your car overnight without an electric plug or going to the gas station for a few minutes?

speeder

6 months agodiscuss

This only means you didn't interacted enough with IOT or junky viral games market...

speeder

7 months agodiscuss

All other games from the same studio have the same features.

In fact, the whole point of their games is that they are coop games where is easy to accidentally kill your allies in hilarious manners. It is the reason for example why to cast stratagems you use complex key sequences, it is intentional so that you can make mistake and cast the wrong thing.

speeder

8 months agodiscuss

  Location: Porto, Portugal
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes
  Technologies: Lua, C, C++, GameDev, Python, know some embedded and some cloud stuff.
  Résumé/CV: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gamedesigner
  Email: [email protected]

Looking for C or C++ roles. (or similar). GameDev and Embedded at my first choices but any work with these technologies is fine. I was working as C++ engineer for a train physics simulation software at Siemens. before that my work was for a pluginless browser luxury ad game company, I was responsible for making ads created using Unreal Engine 5 run on Linux using Wine, receiving the keyboard and mouse commands sent by the browser and giving back compressed video to the browser. Before that I worked for an BMW subsidiary that works with programming for the car themselves, so automotive is fine too.

I also did DevRel in the past and recently interviewed some DevRel positions, made me realize I am also suitable for that and willing to work with that.

I have a lot of experience with iOS and Android, but been some time since I worked with these.

speeder

10 months agodiscuss

I used to manage the Google Ads account of a business I had in the past.

Google Support would call me all the time, and then first thing they would do is ask me to open the interface and repeat some code or another.

speeder

10 months agodiscuss

There are some effects that notoriously work only on rather specific combinations of screens AND cables. Those look horrible on emulators.

Usually it is effects involving transparency, some games for example literally rendered some things only on some frames and not the others, to achieve 50% transparency, others tried alternating scanlines, or the most crazy one: Sonic that made a transparent waterfall by relying on the fact that cables common at that time blurred pixels horizontally, thus it renders one column that is water and one column that is not, and hope they will be blurred into one single column that is 50% transparent water on top of the background.

Screenshot of the waterfall effect: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1cGAP1i_4xQ/maxresdefault.jpg

Can't be shown with a screenshot: Axelay. I never seen that game running on a real CRT to compare, but on emulators that game look horrible, with distortions and flickering things everywhere, I was told this was not the intention at all, instead they relied heavily on CRT hardware to create pseudo-3D and transparency.

speeder

10 months agodiscuss

I had a music teacher that insisted analog recordings were different.

One day she said there is a simple way to prove it. Certain stringed instruments have the string move on their own to the correct note if you put them near a source of similar sound. If you put these instruments in front of a speaker playing from an analog source and have the strings move, then play the exact same music but from a digital source on the same speaker, the strings stop moving, even if to most humans it sounds exactly the same.

Sadly I never had the gear to test this, I am not a professional musician and was learning from that person as a hobby (she is a teacher for professional musicians).

speeder

10 months agodiscuss

I got very sad when my CRT monitor died. I was using a Radeon RX 380X, part of the reason is that it was one of the few cards to still have analog output.

Then I went and played lots of recent games in lower resolution, but could turn on lots of expensive effects even with such underpowered card, because I could do low-res with anti-alias disabled and no scaling and have decent results.

But true pleasure was playing for example Crypt of Necrodancer on that screen, the game felt so easy. I eventually stopped playing after that screen died, I could never nail the timing anymore on modern screens, the response time is not the same.

speeder

11 months agodiscuss

So when I got forced to use Win11 I went to look for a script that disable telemetry. Then I see the script offers the feature of using old behavior for right click menu...

I immediately started to think: but old behavior was so simple and obvious, what is there to change? The I right clicked to check. Immediately was hit with the wtf changes. Why? Why MS?

speeder

11 months agodiscuss

I don't think MS considered any of this. For example there were situations were they had a meeting giving green light one day, and cancelled the next.

Seemly what happened is that MS high-level decision makers, concluded that MS need a lot of cash for AI research, and decided to mass-close studios and cancel games with little verification, just go firing people until the cash liberated for AI is enough, doesn't matter if those people gave even greater revenue recently.

speeder

11 months agodiscuss

The fact you still only got bothered by studio acquisitions show you don't even noticed the studio closures...

MS fired thousands of gamedevs in the last few weeks, cancelled a lot of games, including games the execs liked to play the prototypes, cancelled publishing deals, and even closed entire studios, some of them literally successful that had just released profitable products.

speeder

last yeardiscuss

I sent my resume, but I should inform you that your site is very, very buggy.

speeder

3 years agodiscuss

I saw someone pointing out they are doing exact same things comic companies did leading to their crash.

The comic companies started to sell a ton of variants, foils, collector editions.

They also started to do attention grabbing but bad quality storylines.

And also they started to try to cut middlemen and sell more directly to the consumer.

The end result was that readers eventually noticed quality was crap, with comics being poor products as story medium. And collectors noticed that they had a problem of no readers to buy their stuff, and that x-men #1 os worthless since it had millions of copies, unlike for example action comics #1. This led to stores losing losing money and then going belly up, then suddenly the comics companies themselves were losing money.

speeder

4 years agodiscuss

I am from Brazil, at least you don't have "Electoral Judges" that will happily fuck with the elections and ignore constitution to make sure their preferred candidate win.

The Electoral Judges in Brazil, are censoring actual facts, because despite being facts, they consider it "misinformation", it go so bad that a former supreme court judge of ours got censored for explaining something technical... Despite the fact our constitution explicitly bans any form of censorship. (ironically, as defense against US... our constitution promotes free speech to prevent CIA from subverting the country again).

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Ask HN: How I find a job where what is needed is solid code, not firefighting?

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