Don’t hesitate or overthink it. Just dive headfirst into it. The day you start is the best moment. The thing you chose to do, is the best.

Learn by playing around. Play to your strengths. Dabble with coding, sound, graphics, mechanics, and figure out what gets the fire going. Feed that fire.

When you’ve had a bit of taste, try to complete a small simple project. This is surprisingly difficult! Learn to remove features and complexity, simplifying until you can actually finish the game.

Can’t divulge too many details, but one example was when we had 2 options for solving a problem: 1. The “easy” way, storing a bunch small blobs to s3 as a job was running on an embedded device, or 2. The slightly tricky, implement streaming of said data on the device (not as easy as it sounds).

We went with option 1, the easy one, because it was deemed faster bang for the buck. I did some basic math showing that the bandwidth required upload the high number of blobs to s3 within our time budget was not possible on our uplink.

After we spend a month failing on 1., it was clear that we hit the predicted problem. Eventuelly we implement option 2.

Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)

Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.

A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.

You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.

Must include CHANGELOG…

The changelog:

• misc fixes
• pls work
• fixe a typo

Depending on your needs you can also break it into a columnar format with some standard compression on top. This allows you to search individual fields without looking at the rest.

It also compress exceptionally well, and “rare” fields will be null in most records, so run length encoding will compress them to near zero

See fx parquet

That we stop fawning over tech CEOs

Thank you for saying this. Sometimes I feel like I sm the only one thinking like this 🙇♥️