Microsoft Band! He did a variety of stuff on the team, including some parts of the underlying runtime and also our build system. He added 3rd party compiler support to Visual Studio long before they officially supported it. :)
> (and slightly depressing know I'll never be any where near that level).
Randy is very persistent. That Quake demo was 2 years in the making, and that was after he'd already spent over a decade writing low level code.
Highly optimized code is a matter of time, time, and more time. It is a thousand little improvements that get you towards your goal.
If you want to learn to write that type of low level code, and it is very rewarding, Pick up an embedded board like an ESP32 and go have at it.
What kind of projects those boards might be use of? I actually owned a Tiva launchpad and went through a whole book writing embedded code (not really very practical though, just textbook exercises) but don't see any constraints there. I was about to write some code to drive a LCD screen for my "proto-type gameboy", but it didn't go well because I failed to write the driver. Maybe I should pick it up again.
> (and slightly depressing know I'll never be any where near that level).
Randy is very persistent. That Quake demo was 2 years in the making, and that was after he'd already spent over a decade writing low level code.
Highly optimized code is a matter of time, time, and more time. It is a thousand little improvements that get you towards your goal.
If you want to learn to write that type of low level code, and it is very rewarding, Pick up an embedded board like an ESP32 and go have at it.