Friday, October 10, 2014

Interesting Talks and Articles

What Your Culture Really Says
Talks on the Science Behind Motivation, or why bonuses don't work
Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation (transcript):

Kathy Sierra: "The Secrets of the Whisperers" (motivation and gamification)

For Best Results, Forget the Bonus

Why Bonus Systems Don't Work

Joel on Software

Whaddaya Mean, You Can't Find Programmers?

Alex St. John: OpenGL vs Direct3D

Alex St. John: "Recruiting Giants"

Paying Down Your Technical Debt

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of C

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Moving back to Texas!

My five year, mostly sunless odyssey in the Seattle area is finally coming to an end. I'll be visiting occasionally, but I can't wait to move back to Dallas next month. Thanks to everyone at Valve for making the place such an amazing company to work at. Also, a huge thanks to the truly world class developers at Rad Game Tools for their key help during the Steam Linux launch and helping us kick start vogl's development. Without the devs at Rad a lot of the stuff we did over the past few years just would not have happened. (Umm Gabe, why don't you just buy these guys already and officialize the Valve "satellite office" in Kirkland?)

To the Linux and GL community, I feel bad about quitting Valve before completing vogl. (Not that something like vogl could ever really be completed!) In the couple months before I quit I did everything I could think of (wrote the wiki, got UE 4 compatibility, built the regression suite, wrote up a 6+ month itemized task roadmap, etc.) to ensure vogl's development would continue moving forward without me. From studying the changes made on vogl's github repo after I quit it certainly looks like the devs at Valve and LunarG have done a good job moving it forward.

I think it'll be 3 years or more before OpenGL-Next is usable and relevant to shipping products. So even though vogl's has little chance of scaling beyond GL v4.x, it should remain a useful tool for a long time. I may fork it one day if I have to do any hardcore GL development again.