I'm actually being really productive having the stream on in the background. I'm not looking at him code, but hearing his techno going is reminding me that someone somewhere is getting a ton of shit done, and it's shaming me into working hard.
Ha, I remember trying to make sites that looked this good, with this aesthetic, back in the 90s.
But now, I totally agree. The stock photo girl with headphones along with a lot of other subtle things would make me instantly think "this a fake/auto-generated/contentless site" and hit the back button without even reading it.
It's interesting how strongly websites can give off vibes.
I agree the site doesn't look that great, but I've been a happy subscriber for years. I prefer the "Chillout Dreams" and "Vocal Trance" channels over all the others.
Using the higher bitrate streams coupled with a nice pair of AKG headphones means I can listen all day and tune out the rest of the noise in my house.
I listen to electrohouse everyday. I'm not that into dubstep and I tend to not like it outside of coding, but it puts you into the zone pretty quickly, kind of like if the techno rythm stopped you from thinking normally.
For those interested, many of the mixes can be downloaded for free out there. I found :
http://soundcloud.com/tsnm all the TSNM no excuses mix, the 100 download limit is quickly maxed out on those though
You can use iTunes as well. Click on the Radio item under Library on the left pane, and you will find the DI radio stations under the Electronica genre.
The music reminds me of a small group of coders I was inspired by at my first startup. Back then I was only doing tech support and light front-end work, but every day it was three programmers and I getting stuff done to music like this. Ever since then, this kind of music is a great booster for me, even though I get embarrassed if someone comes into my office while it's playing...
The only thing I try for nowadays is to find an energetic, repetitive mix with no vocals.
I also recommend the podcast, "Trance Around the World" -- two hours of awesome trance. I program with it on, I go to sleep with it playing, we just had a party with it playing in the background.
(Also, if you are a Spotify user, try the Radio/Trance mix.)
I also like Psytrance. I just search for Psytrance on shoutcast and go with one of the top 3. The nice thing about these kind of genres is they're loud and monotonous and drown out the world, whilst not being too much work to listen to.
I shut it off after a few minutes (not a huge techno fan), but it did shame me into going back to work on an iPhone app I've been putting off for far too long (which is great because I built it for myself and there have been numerous times when I've had occasion to use it since I thought of it).
in a world where you only seem to get respected by using osx, vim, nodejs, python, ruby etc. its refreshing to see someone with so much influence working with Java and Eclipse on Windows!
He codes with what he knows to get a prototype. I bet he'll get a team of smart guys involved once it's time to get the game running on other platforms.
Of course, it'd be better in the long run to stay up to date and eliminate that extra work, but sometimes it helps to build it first to see if it'll even get to the refinement phase.
I'm quite sure that such a major change in architecture will be completely infeasible by now. The whole renderer would have to be rewritten from scratch, and given how the Minecraft codebase appears to be a complete mess architecture-wise, the changes would probably reverberate everywhere.
It's a real shame that when he decided to completely rewrite the Minecraft engine (which he finished but regretted), he didn't switch to using Modern OpenGL.
Actually using the deprecated immediate mode is the only possible way to get compatibility with the indie game user base. Minecraft only requires OpenGL 1.1 and I think it's a key element to keep players happy.
Multiple rendering path are of course possible but require much more work.
It might be a different point of view depending on which you enjoy more. For example I wrote a trivial raytracer in Haskell once for a project at uni. It was hard because I never wrote a raytracer before and I never used Haskell. I'm still impressed with the result and the process for a number of reasons I would happily discuss.
At the same time I used compile-time code generation in Java to rewrite some handcrafted class hierarchy into something that was short, correct and implemented the right interfaces consistently. It was also a non-trivial problem to solve and the result was very useful.
The difference is that I'll never describe the second one as something positive. It was time wasted working around inflexible constraints in Java in the only reasonably available way to make the code suck less. Sure, it required creativity and a clever solution, but I'd never want to do it again. Ask me about something interesting related to coding and I could mention the first example in a couple of contexts. The other one would be only mentioned with "Ah, you can't do that in a simple way, but I know a hack that will work - you'll just have to explain it twice to everyone looking at it."
>A hell of a lot of people are doing really good work with Java.
Absolutely true.
And a hell of lot of people that brag about Haskell, LISP et al, don't produce anything useful to the masses with them. Where are all those LISP/Haskell/whatever killer apps? I mean, even Erlang has CouchDB, Riak and RabbitMQ.
I don't mean to troll, I actually think that 99% of those languages are used for personal/hobby projects, or for stuff in some company where the rules are lax and the programmer can choose whatever he likes --and those could be great or shit, but not really relevant to anybody else.
I don't see many widely used tools made with them, Open or closed source.
Re: the people mentioning HN runs on Arc. I know that. It's a service. Doesn't count as "widely used tools" (I gave CouchDB, Riak etc as examples).
It's more of the "stuff in some company where the rules are lax and the programmer can choose whatever he likes" variety of uses. As was ViaWeb.
Not to mention that HN is filled with bugs and a broken caching system, and Arc itself is half-complete and mostly abandoned IIRC.
I think it has to do with the fact that Lisps and functional programming is not something you tend to use to build a whole product on, but rather something to crack the hard nuts with at a higher level of abstraction.
For example, at Chartboost our backend runs on a LAMP stack, but our new implementation of the smart ad targeting algorithm involves using Clojure (another Lisp dialect). Chartboost is definitely not "Made in Clojure," but I think it's fair to say that that doesn't mean that the language isn't being used to build a useful product.
I strongly disagree that Functional programming is something that inherently is not suited to building a whole product on. Although I cannot providing evidence that it always is the case, Jane Street is a wonderful example of what happens when a bunch of really smart people get together and use a statically typed functional language to produce a robust piece of software which solves hard problems. Not everything at Jane Street is written in ML, but MANY of the employees write in ML, the software devs, the quants, te systems folks, and even the traders.
I believe HN is written in PG's lisp like language called Arc.
C, C++ and Java are the standard tools of the industry, so it's unusual and noteworthy when an alternative language or technology is used for a product. You can use a wide variety of languages for web development backends because it tends to be less sensitive to performance(the majority of hits should be hitting caches), it has simple IO requirements, and user sessions usually don't have much state so parallelism is easier. I'd argue that web development is much more about the product than technical programming challenges, so having the ability to iterate quickly is especially important and leads to favoring scripting languages over the traditional languages which are more suitable for complex and high performance software.
>When building the engine, Notch wrote a function which would continuously pan the camera around and clip through the walls and keep the view on top, so he could make changes to the code and see the effects they made in real time. I’m used to testing by writing a function, building it, installing it on the device I’m testing on, and then seeing the result, which can take up to a minute at a time, so it’s easy to see how HotSwapping could save a lot of development time.
Wow, maybe it's because he's done it a million times before, but it looks like he's super efficient, mainly because he's using the IDE's features to the max. He's also rapidly iterating at about 3-4 builds per minute.
Yeah, that's hotswap in practical use. When using debug mode in Eclipse, you're able hotswap - which basically means that you can change the content of a method while the program is running. When the method is called again, the new content will be executed.
Just a point of information: he can't do that here because the Java/OpenGL interface is all static Java methods (which only get loaded when the class loads the first time).
I might be missing something, but how is that relevant? Surely there's no need to hot-swap any OpenGL API methods, right?
EDIT: Also, I googled a bit and I can find no indication that HotSwap doesn't work for static methods. Are you sure you're not spreading misinformation here? See for instance http://stackoverflow.com/a/9466778
He's not even putting Eclipse's keyboard shortcuts to full use. If you have a passing knowledge of a few important key combinations you can move quite a bit faster than he is.
I was doing some Java coding recently for the first time in a long time and I was really shocked at how good the synergy between Java and a good IDE can be. Java as a language is uninspiring but it's only half the story.
I switched to 720p and did the popout window to watch, and now 3 times I've caught myself trying to move his 3D window out of the way to look at the code in Eclipse..
Idea: start a new business model where people agree to being video-taped and then somebody else trims the content to make it more enjoyable to view (remove the non-programming related web searches, work breaks, etc.) - and add some extra voice commentary on what is going on, play by play...
If you follow him on Twitter, he was looking for a code quality analyzer months ago. After trying some he found there were a lot of things he should change in the way he writes code. He settled on Sonar for some reason, don't remember why.
It's interesting that some (like me, and it seems like, you) want music to invoke calm while working, while others want to be energized, or even made to be a bit tense. I wouldn't be surprised if there were a reasonably simple neurochemical explanation. Pounding, building music makes uses one change, calming music makes another, and who needs what depends on your existing chemistry.
Ha, really? I skipped through that video 30 seconds at a time, and it was just noise and someone hitting some random (sounding) keys on a piano to me. Totally distracting.
Funny how different people's tastes are. I wonder where they come from.
For comparison, here's[1] a song I love to listen to while coding, mostly after about 1:45 but especially at the 3:20 mark.
(Also my first listen). The piano repeats exactly the same 4 clusters over and over. I wouldn't call that random. It's soothing to me after giving it 60 sec in the background.
Skipping ahead 30 sec at a time is definitely a sign you don't like something. What are you hoping to find at the end? :)
Anyway, you're right. Artistic taste is personal. Sometimes I think the majority of our judgment is more about avoiding turn-offs than really feeling something new.
There is so much that is subjective about gamedev that automated tests don't really work the same way.
How do you define a test for something as subjective as the "look and feel" of an interactive experience?
How do you automate this process?
1 Move the bounding box on the tree a few pixels.
2 Load the game
3 Move towards the tree until collision.
4 GOTO 1 UNLESS it "feels right"
Maybe regression testing, once you get things working, to prevent new bugs from popping up, or unit tests for game logic, but I don't know of many gamedevs doing full TDD.
His approach seems to be one of "crafting" an experience, by mostly testing it by playing the game himself after every change, instead of trying to "engineer" a piece of software.
A great aproach for designing an interactive piece.
relax uncle bobo ;) I'm a general proponent of testing, but this is a game and as such the feeling is more important, not everything is capturable by tests.
Notch is creating right now, watch http://vimeo.com/36579366 "inventing on principle" which explains the importance of immediate visual feedback.
Also give him just a "little" credit for minecraft
Depends on how long ago you wrote the tests. Pretty soon the tests you will write, will most likely test that the code does what it does. Not what it should do.
And yes, it is a better problem to have, then to have code that noone wants.
except the code already works right (in proportional to your skill). and if it stops working right you did something bad. and you're using version control, so you can do diffs, rollback, do branches/forks, experiments, etc. This is a much faster workflow than being weighed down by automated test baggage. Again, some folks hold the code in their mind and do a very good job of making perfect incremental changes, only moving forward, no regressions. (not 100% of the time, but with experience/skill you can approach that, especially before you end your dev session for the day.)
If thoose folks exists, i have never met any. And if they exist, they are few. And if i then need to hire more people to work on the project. Im pretty much out of luck.
Even if i know i write perfect code (i dont). I wouldnt trust everyone that will work on my code to write perfect code.
I'm an advocate of testing, and even TDD, but realistically, automated testing takes place in so, so few places compared to the entire world of software development and especially gamedev. People writing automated tests are, sadly, in a tiny minority. As an advocate for it, though, it makes me happy there are plenty of people left to convince and tools left to develop! :)
Anyone noted which software stack he is using? Is it plain Java 3D API or any libraries on top of it?
Also, I'd expect things would be more dynamic in whatever new game he's making, but that seems to be pretty static room he's playing with. Of course he could just be testing out various engine features, before setting out on the "content" part of the game.
Always shocked how Notch doesn't seem to know a single keystroke shortcut in Eclipse. Watching him hit "Debug" with his mouse, or pick quick fixes, etc, is nuts.
What's even stranger is how fast he is without knowing any of these shortcuts. :)
Minecraft didn't have levels and the entire game was essentially a level editor - so this might be the actual game. Moving and reshaping objects instead of smashing and placing blocks.
From watching his older live coding sessions, I am guessing it is one of the stations on DI radio (http://www.di.fm/). Ambient Space Music, Chillout Dreams, and PsyChill happen to be personal favorite stations of mine to code to.
Why do people care about this? I mean, the guy is coding, cool... but what's the big deal? I don't even think anything he has done is particularly great.
I don't think it's the same. This is the (tedious) process of composing something. Ever watched a video of a composer composing Or a painter paint? Must be distracting for him too. Either that or the attention actually forces him to be more disciplined.
you are joking - or at least I'm reading your comment like you are based on your second line.
However, it's worth noting that if you'd have a job that Notch is willing to take and you are not hiring him into that role then it's practically a factual statement that your hiring process is broken. Admittedly that's a contrived scenario as he made tens of millions from Minecraft and founded a gaming company who's chief reason to exist is to finish the games that Notch starts.
It's not a joke. Notch is good at thinking of fun game ideas and implementing them, but he's not a very skilled software developer. I'd never hire him.
He belongs right where he is, as an indie game developer - kickstarting a fun game, alone, from scratch, proving that it is popular and that people love it, and then letting more skillful programmers take over developing it and fixing all the bugs that he created.
I'd have to guess that he is in fact a very skilled software developer. Minecraft is a fairly complex project, as is emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment.
I created mineflayer[0] - software which implements the minecraft client/server protocol and provides an API so that you can create minecraft bots in javascript. So I followed minecraft development for a while, decompiled and analyzed the code, had to deal with the shitty protocol, and observed the way bugs are introduced and solved.
I've seen his posts about how git is too hard to learn[1] so he's going to stick with svn. I've seen him post that "we've started to bring in bug fixing into the development method"[2], and then the very next release is a "bug fix" release which causes more new bugs than it solves.[3]
I wouldn't hire him for a software development job that required any level of maintenance. He's good at creating original fun concepts but not at making it nice for people to read, modify, or maintain his code.
Also, I would argue that emulating a 16-bit CPU within the constraints of a game environment is easy and straightforward. For one, it's ridiculously simple to do test driven development without any overhead. And second, have you seen all the emulators that have cropped up after the specs were posted? There is already an emulator for almost every popular programming language.
>Although I don't agree with his opinion, he's surely entitled to one.
Everybody's entitled to have one. Did I try to suppress him expressing his opinion? No, I just piled mine on top.
> It doesn't take a chicken to judge an egg.
"Goes to credibility, your honor", as they say in legal tv series.
I don't know about chickens and eggs, but I believe that it sure takes a good programmer to be able to judge another. It's a technical field, it's not something really subjective. So you have to know your stuff in order to judge what someone else does --if anything, we have too many misinformed opinions.
> if you'd have a job that Notch is willing to take and you are not hiring him into that role then it's practically a factual statement that your hiring process is broken
Why do you say that? Do you think Notch's success is a result of him being an exceptionally competent programmer?
Creativity, resourcefulness and grit are the three main virtues of the best programmers in the world. He may be a 10/10 on all three which is just about unheard of.
no they make the best. That's why we are doing talent acquisitions regularly. These employees could be temporary (1-3 years based on earnout) but can do incredible things in that time if you let them.
And I don't even like techno.