Domain: altdevblogaday.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to altdevblogaday.com.
Comments · 4
-
Re:This will help the Occulus Rift A LOT!!!
Well, we don't know that. There are visual cues that significantly affect tiredness and motion sickness, and having smart people like Carmack on the case goes a long way to solving the technical problems.
He has done some interesting posts already on latency. -
Internships are hard work!
An internship should clearly be:
- For a well-defined project;
- For a limited time;
- Paid (at a basic level);
- As much work for the employer as it is for the intern.If you're not mentoring your interns heavily, you stand no chance of developing a talent pipeline. I wrote about my experiences with an internship program here: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/18/lessons-learned-from-training-interns/
The critical aspect is that you have to have the available bandwidth to mentor and supervise an intern. You have to give them clear goals and a clear chance to succeed.
-
Re:Python != web
Which a linter would have thrown a fit about immediately. if you have a large enough codebase, any class of error that is syntactically legal probably exists there. In a large project, code quality is every bit as statistical as physical material properties – flaws exist all over the place, you can only hope to minimize the impact they have on your users." Depending on the quality of the coders, this will be higher or lower. This is regardless of language.
-
Re:learn anything through games
I'm also very interested in programming games. So far I haven't found any that are exactly what I want, but there are some enjoyable ones.
I used to do programming contests in college, while I enjoyed these I always felt like I wasn't learning enough. They're designed so that you'd need a very good team and lots of outside training. It isn't nearly as much fun outside of real (or even practice) competition, but you can find big banks of problems and an online judge if you want to play along. TopCoder is similar and much easier to participate in, but again its focus is on competition, not education (though maybe that's changed?).
The closest I've seen in video games are those by Zachtronics Industries, they all deal in some way with engineering design. SpaceChem in particular is quite programming-like (as explored here) and has a great difficulty progression. Kohctpyktop is an integrated circuit design puzzle with a strong test driven development bent, though if I hadn't already studied EE it would probably be prohibitively difficult.
There's also pleasingfungus' Manufactoria, which has a lot of CS (stack machine) stuff in it and a great sense of progression.
A lot of these attempts tend to be directed at kids; the old Rocky's Boots was one of the first steps in this direction, with logic gates and simple circuits. I didn't find it very good, but ToonTalk is an ambitious visual programming environment and game-like tutorial rooted in SmallTalk semantics.
Cort Stratton wrote a post in September called The Games Programmers Play, which covers this topic well. The comments here on Slashdot and on Gamasutra suggest some more such games.
I've been doing a lot of thinking about designing "games for learning programming", I've written somewhat more extensively about it on my blog. I hope you find some of these suggestions interesting, sorry for the linkstorm.