Posts

1. First and foremost: measure early, measure often. It's been said so often and it still needs repeating. In fact, the more you know about performance the easier it can be to fall into the trap of not measuring enough. Measuring will show exactly where you need to focus your efforts. It will also tell you without question whether your work has actually lead to an improvement, and to what degree.2. The easiest way to make things go faster is to do less work. Use a more efficient algorithm, refactor code to eliminate unnecessary operations, move repeated work outside of loops. There are many flavours, but very often the biggest performance boosts are gained by simply solving the same problem through fewer instructions.3. Understand the performance characteristics of your system. Is your application CPU bound, GPU compute bound, memory bound? If you don't know this you could make the code ten times as fast without gaining a single ms because the system is still stuck waiting for a memory transfer. On the flip side, if you know your system is busy waiting for memory, perhaps you can move computations to this spot to leverage this free work? This is particularly important in shader optimizations (latency hiding).4. Solve a different problem! You can very often optimize your program by redefining your problem. Perhaps you are using the optimal algorithm for the problem as defined. But what does the end user really need? Often there are very similar but much easier problems which are equivalent for all practical purposes. Sometimes because the complexity lies in special cases which can be avoided or because there's a cheap approximation which gives sufficient accuracy. This happens especially often in graphics programming where the end goal is often to give an impression that you've calculated something.

Things that eat CPU: iterations, string operations. Things that waste CPU: lock contentions in multi-threaded environments, wait states.

depending on your long term objectives taking a sabbatical might have been the worst thing to recover from burnout. You want to reassociate effort with reward, and the best way to do that is to work on small things related to what caused your burnout that will "guarantee wins with low expectations".

1. I am not my thoughts or feelings. It’s surprising how far this one will take you2. If work is your support system, your life exists on shaky ground3. Personal struggles become work struggles and vice versa. You can’t draw a clean box around grief and loss, or pretend that work stress can stay at work4. There were major gaps in my life in terms of social connections, time spent in nature, finding artistic outlets, etc.5. Focusing on real self-care/improvement as one’s primary purpose in life open doors internally and externally

Why should developing the feel of an app be any different than the feel of a game. That’s what good apps are like. It’s like you can play a good app as much as you use it. All good tools and instruments in history have been crafted like this.

What does it even mean for an app to "feel" like something? How do you quantify that so you can do a proper comparison with other apps, or (from the app author's side, take corrective action)?Author calls these apps "brutalist" and leaves it at that. To his credit, he does list three features that he's like to see: fluid scrolling, swipe gestures, and tap-and-hold contextual menus. Fine. But then goes on to describe his feelings "inert and rigid". Then "comfort, fun, and panache". What on earth is he asking for out of these apps? How do you objectively compare one app's "panache" with another? If I was a developer, what are the steps I can follow to program some "comfort" into my app? These complaints seem so wishy-washy and underspecified.Then he leaves with the Kubrick quote: “Sometimes the truth of a thing isn’t in the think of it, but in the feel of it.” We're fully in the realm of mysticism now, this is not an attempt to fairly compare or measure anything.

> If I released a utility application and a reviewer told me [not your words, but for example] it felt cold and without pizazz, and it didn't zing and pop and it wasn't sleek enough, I wouldn't know what to do to fix this.The point of the piece is that there are developers that would know what to do with that feedback, and for whatever reason more of those developers develop for iOS than Android.

If you owned a restaurant and got a Yelp review like “the food was great but the ambiance was a turn-off” what would you do? IndigoPrime 3 months ago | root | parent | next [–] Yes. Or: “The hammer technically works when it comes to getting nails into walls, but it’s uncomfortable to hold.”

We need separate systems, one for actually learning without financial pressure, and one for joining the workforce - before anyone brings up College/Uni as the solution, they can be if transformed but as of right now there are too many in Uni doing so to get a job.

When you have a system organized around the morality of work and not working ostracizes you from society, health care, shelter, food security, etc, what do you expect?My wish is the next 20 years brings a post scarcity society where wage slaving for a corporation so your family doesn’t die if they get cancer isn’t so much a moral imperative.

We should also dramatically realign the education system to value real learning, personal and community growth, and a culture of learning rather than just daycare (not that childcare for parents isn’t tremendously important, believe me), funding zillions of BS college admin positions, job training for corporations that are to cheap to train their own employees, and grades (as we know them. Grades have so much nonsense loaded on top of them