mike.mainguy

In a recent elevator conversation with the team, we stumbled on a side conversation about the difference between accuracy and precision. I've always used them defined this way: Accuracy - The nearness of a value to the "real" value Precision - The resolution of a measurement It turns out this is not entirely correct and these definitions, while technically accurate in certain fields, are not universally held to be true. In fact, the above definition of precision is almost completely wrong for most other engineering and scientific disciplines. A more accurate (see what I did there?) set of definitions would be something like: Accuracy - The nearness of a value to the "real" value Precision - The probability of repeated measurement yielding the same result Measurement Resolution - The resolution of a measurement Source: Wikipedia

I'm currently struggling with another project suffering from what I dub the "Trail of Tears" architecture pattern. This is a situation where the architecture is littered with the remains of legacy code that never seems to get removed. This leads to mounting maintenance costs, and a fragile architecture that becomes increasingly difficult to manage. It also has the side effect of creating a "broken window" problem where there is no clear "correct" way to do things and the necessary rigor around adhering to standards and best practices (I HATE that term...but oh well) rapidly falls apart. Historically, the only way I've seen to combat this is to rigorously support opportunistic refactoring other wise known as following the " Boy Scout Rule ". While this has it's own problems (folks breaking seemingly unrelated things trying to clean things up and inflated scope for features being two key ones) it has proven to be the only way to...

I just read Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom and I just realized that Minecraft is the new Doom . If you don't believe me, find a teenager that has a computer (or smartphone, or tablet) that hasn't played Minecraft. Doom revolutionized gaming, not by making the FPS technologically possible (thought this is a big deal), but because it spawned a multitude of user generated mods and made it relatively easy and open to do this. This, in turn, incited myriads of hacker youth to build their own mods, edit levels, even (in my case) buy books on graphics programming and learn about BSPs, GPUs, ASM coding, optimizing C code, and other esoteria that I would have ignored. Frankly, the almost the entire gaming industry owes a debt of gratitude for inspiring the current flock (actually, we're probably on the second or third generation now) of hackers who saw success building their own games with toolkits provided by the makers of Doom. This seems to have been largely ignored up...