Plaidophile

So, like, a few weeks ago, when I first got on Second Life, I met someone who really wanted to get into the gaming industry, and who actually had a hell of a lot of hobbyist experience and could articulate this impressively-well to me. So I passed his resume on to Antoine and got to know this guy, and he got an interview and I warned him about a lot of the issues at work and so on, and yet he still took the job anyway.

So anyway, today was my first day working with him, and I am happy to say that my instincts were right in suggesting him — this guy is great.

So, yeah, Neill is a great programmer, who can actually think abstractly, come up with algorithms as needed, and see places where things can be improved. It has only been a day but I can already tell that it'll be a privilege to work with him, and that he will keep the bullshit levels to a minimum for as long as I am there. Hell, he might even be the difference between me leaving ASAP and not.

Incidentally, this is the first coworker I've had who also knows of the whole 'fluffy' thing, and that I have a weblog. He is also probably assuming that I am writing about him right at this very minute, but since he just moved here he doesn't have broadband yet, so nyah. :d

Neill is definitely an awesome programmer, though. I mean, I already knew that before, but he totally proved it today when he implemented a minimal, ultra-fast Lempel-Ziv compressor (with the intent of sacrificing some compression for speed and code size), in less time than it takes most programmers to even figure out how to use zlib. He also took the initiative to do this just to see if he could do something useful for the platform, rather than it being something that he was told to do (especially since Antoine certainly wouldn't have told him to do that).

Oh, and the really neat thing is that he uses the classic Turbo Vision syntax coloring scheme. He seemed surprised (and happy) that I recognized it immediately. Antoine and James had no idea what we were talking about.

Aside: the last time I had a job using Visual Studio (way back in 1997) I configured it to look like Turbo Vision. Since that time I switched to XEmacs, though, and now I prefer the dark-colors-on-white-background thing. Though my Visual Studio syntax highlight scheme isn't the default one. But I don't really care which colors are used as long as there's a visible difference between various things. Unfortunately, VS.NET doesn't highlight identifiers differently than types like what XCode, XEmacs, Turbo Vision, etc. do, so I don't know if I can ever be happy with VS.NET's syntax highlighting to begin with.

Anyway, after I got to work today at 11AM, I still put in a full 8 hours, after which Neill and I went out to dinner together. It was nice to be able to compare notes on the codebase and also talk about stuff not work-related, though it was mostly about Second Life. He thinks it's a neat toy and nothing to get excited about (even though he actually makes about US$300/month selling his in-game cars!), while I think it's a neat toy with the potential to become something to get excited about, and is also the exact sort of thing I want to be working on.

Though, for now, the cellphone gaming seems okay, at least while James and Antoine are still mellow from vacation. Though right now I'm getting a lot of get-it-done-now-now-now rush from Jason, which is pretty annoying for multiple reasons, like when Jason decides that Right Now is the perfect time to start working on finalizing the character animations when I can't even display them since I'm, say, in the middle of yet another asset-management refactor or whatever.

Also, I've noticed that Jason really wants to see differences where there aren't any. All of our character assets are at the same size and resolution and so on, on all of the phones, the only difference being how they're framed for the different screen sizes, but he insists that the animations look different on them, with different movements (even though they're all using the same movement parameters, again all at the same resolution) and with the "different sizes" having different appearances of blurriness and so on. Even though they're all pixel-for-pixel identical, and the only difference is that some of the screens have different sizes of pixels (but that doesn't affect what the pixels actually are, though he's complaining that the motions are different and so on).

Anyway. Yeah, maybe things won't suck too badly for a change.