My personal opinion on code, coding and coders
I have a confession to make: Sometimes I feel like an imposter. I feel like I might lose my job any time soon. I feel that I suck at it and someone is going to find out.
Continue reading “Are you faking it and scared someone will find out?”I am a pretty laid back guy, but lately I have started getting a bit worried about the state of programming, or more specifically loud mouthed blog-wielding programmers. I have seen so much stupid shit floating around that I feel it is my duty to stick an IBM Model M keyboard in the ground and wave the flag of Sanity in peoples faces.
It seems that quite a few programmers have discovered a “new” paradigm called Functional Programming, and suddenly it has become fashionable to dismiss Object Oriented Programming as the Old Way To Do Things.
Continue reading “Functional rulez, OOP sucks?”
It’s been almost 7 years since Darkfall was released. I spent 10 years working on that mmo, and I wanted to make sure the technology behind Darkfall wasn’t forgotten so I wrote an article about it.
Darkfall still is one of the few MMOs that supports very large scale battles (hundreds of players), and that is only possible because of the technology powering the game.
Click here to read about the technology behind Darkfall – Spenefett.
Way back in 1998 me and a few friends started something that changed all our lives. I was 24 at the time, just finished with computer science studies at the university in Bergen, and had moved to Oslo to start working in a company that reviewed and sold games. The company was going to build a gaming network and I was hired to help them. Here I met Claus and Bjørn Tore who had the idea for an mmo called Darkfall.
I had been nurturing a dream of making games since I was a kid, and hearing about Darkfall made me want to turn that dream into reality. From the autumn of 1998 we started getting all the pieces into place, and after a couple of false starts we founded Razorwax in May 2000, and had seed funding secured by July that same year.
Fast forward to April 2002. Our original investor told us we weren’t going to receive any more money from them, but since our offices were in the investors building they would let us stay there a while longer so we could try a last-ditch effort to get proper funding. Continue reading “Three kids, a job, a life, and a dream”
From the age of 11 one thing that was absolutely certain to me was that I was going to be a programmer. That was the age when I got my Commodore 64 and started to program in BASIC. I loved programming so much, that after a while I was programming more than I was playing games. There is something so sweet and pure about programming that nothing else in real life really can match it. Even with the bugs, time constraints and frustrations a modern programmer deals with, programming is still a sweet deal! Continue reading “Maturing as a programmer – How to supercharge your career”
Note: This article is about Play Framework 1.2.x and might not apply to Play 2.x projects.
The other day I had to convert some code from C to Java. This code runs some pretty simple calculations, using a few classes as data-holders, and running a few thousand iterations. I had to get this working as part of the backend for a Play Framework web application.
In C the code would run blindingly fast, and return the results within 10-20 milliseconds. All good!
After a couple of hours of converting the code and fixing the pointer/reference/initialization oddities between Java and C, I got the code running. Well, more like walking, or lazily sauntering along. The Java code took 4 seconds to run. I know Java is perceived to be slow, but my experience with it was telling me that there is no way it should be so slow.
Continue reading “How to avoid Play Framework killing performance”
In 2001 Hibernate was created to ease development for the hordes of unhappy developers fighting with Java’s poor EJB implementation. EJB was so confusing and over-engineered that Hibernate’s simpler approach seemed like pure heaven in contrast.
Eventually hibernate inspired Java’s JPA and became a certified implementation of JPA.
History lesson is over.
Lets look at the status today. Right now Hibernate is a very popular ORM java library, maybe the most popular of them all. And I can’t understand what is wrong with people. Continue reading “Hibernate, just stop it!”
This year Bergen had its first Game Development Festival, arranged by Linn Søvig, JoinGame and the Norwegian Game Developers Guild. The festival was named Konsoll, the Norwegian word for Console (read: Xbox, Ps3, Wii and the likes).
Disclaimer: I am on the board of the Game Developers Guild, but was not involved with the workgroup that was responsible for arranging Konsoll.
Dragons’ Den is based on a TV show. The concept goes like this:
A hopeful entrepreneur has a set time to present his great idea to a panel of experts, and then the panel has a set time to critique the idea. When I say critique, I mean tear apart, as dragons do.
At Konsoll the Dragons’ Den was set up so that the entrepreneurs had 5 minutes to present their ideas, and the panel had 10 minutes to give feedback. After the feedback each panelist would have a fictional 10 million Nok (around $1 300 000) to distribute to the participants. The panel was Alex Trowers from Boss Alien Ltd, Bjørn Alsterberg from BTO, James Portnow from Rainmaker Games and Tor Ole Rognaldsen from Fuzz.
Agile seems to be losing some of its shiny newness at last. This is great! It means we can start talking about agile without fanboys eagerly interrupting to spurt out some repeat-hyperbole from an Agile Evangelist meeting of some sort.
It also means that I can tell you this dirty little secret without too many people choking on their agile-conference-coffee:
TDD, XP, Scrum, Kanban (and the rest) are all processes and tools. All their proponents claim you *have* to follow the process, no matter what. If Agile fails for you, then it is because you are not following the process!
The Manifesto for Agile Software Development tells us that we should value “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. How is it that the Agile community has accepted the rigorous following of strict processes? I think it is because there is a market for selling processes. And those in the game of selling processes won’t tell you that sometimes the process just doesn’t work. The same way Toyota won’t tell you that sometimes their cars unintentionally accelerate and can kill you.
The real secret is that it’s the people that matter, not the process! Process is good. Formalizing development methods is good. But if you have the wrong people you will fail, no matter what process you use. Conversely, if you have the right people it doesn’t really matter what process you follow. You will most likely succeed.
It is time we stopped selling processes as the magic bullet. Agile is great, and methodologies like Scrum, TDD and XP can be good facilitators for getting from concept to release. But they do not solve the fundamental problem that a bad team fails no matter what process it uses.
Programming is a human activity, as described in the classic book ‘The Psychology of Computer Programming” by Gerald Weinberg. Therefore the human and psychological aspect needs to be considered when forming a team.
The fact is: Some people don’t work well together no matter how well their skill sets match. Some people are useless within certain processes. And there are also people in the programming field that could be of more use doing something completely different.
We should strive to create the perfect team, not the perfect process.
Darkfall was released a little over 2 years ago, on the 25th of February 2009.
Having been one of the original members of the team and one of the founders, I felt the urge to tell the story of the making of Darkfall.
This my personal account, but I have tried to tell the story as accurately as possible. There are enough details to fill a book, so I have selected the parts that are important to me in order to fit this into a readable post.
Click here to read ‘The making of Darkfall – One developers perspective’