Comment by dclowd9901
5 years ago
The other day, I started playing this game called TIS-100. The game simulates something like assembly programming and I had so much fun with it. Then I realized it’s been nearly half a year that I’ve actually written proper code for something (rather than a GitHub workflow script or account provision mechanism for testing framework) and built something that I was actually proud of.
The love and passion are still there, but their buried under the needs of my current mediocre job. I need to find a position that will let be get back to the task of building things again, rather than just tweaking scripts and keeping the machinery humming.
Part of the problem is, to borrow an analogy, the frame has gotten really big and the space for the painting is smaller. We recently finished a two or four sprint to ... deploy yellow world. It has bitbucket pieces, Jenkins pieces, EKS terraform, et.c etc., we were all super happy that it worked, but it doesn’t do as much as you can do with twenty minutes in basic in a 1990 PC. And most of the people that wired all this stuff together can’t even write code to draw parabolas or calculate or whatever. It used to be I would develop for a few months then spend a week or two getting stuff in production, for new projects, or few days adding features/bug fixing form existing code, then get it shipped in a few days. There was thorough testing thru code all along, and evil network layers, and so on., and most of the head space was in the code. Now it seems like teams end up spending months trying to get a docker image with all their dependencies and yaml files and so on. And the code is just taking some SQL that ran in a database and running it on some new cloud platform that is still solving acid problems Oracle mastered twenty years ago. Half the code is just orchestration run this hello world Spark job that moves data from here to there. It is cobol level Scala.
I know this is a tangent to your main point, but in case you haven't already done so, check out some of the other Zachtronics games. SpaceChem is my favourite; it's not literally a programming game like TIS-100, but conceptually it pretty much is.
They also have another game (the name of which escapes me right now) that is sort of like a bigger version of TIS-100, where you have to write code for microprocessors. I didn't get into that one -- it was a bit less pure and straight to the point compared to TIS-100 or SpaceChem, and one of my favourite things about those games is their fundamental simplicity and transparency -- but I've heard it is good too.