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Category Archives: productivity

What Programming a Game in 48 Hours Taught Me About Programming Games

By Jeff | Published: August 28, 2013

I participated in Ludum Dare 27 this weekend, programming a complete game, Spacetime Adventure, in 48 hours. I make games for a living but I’d never done that before. It was fun. It was also enlightening. For the past several years I’ve spent most of my development time with C++11 in Xcode. I like it. […]

Also posted in games, Ludum Dare, programming | Comments closed

Programmers are Trees

By Jeff | Published: April 25, 2012

Programmers have opinions. Some programmers like OpenGL, others like DirectX. Some like reallyLongVariableNames. Others like them asap. Some use templates like McGyver uses chewing gum, like Ford Prefect uses towels. Others avoid templates like they were tapeworms. Some programmers like a nice, tight, K&R. unsigned brevity(unsigned i){ return i ? i*brevity(–i) : 1; } Others […]

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Conservation of Mentons

By Jeff | Published: October 19, 2011

I like to imagine that my brain runs on mentons. Mentons are tiny particles of mental energy that move through the brain producing thoughts, intuitions, and insights. The more mentons you have, the more ideas you are able to produce and the better the quality of those ideas. When you run low on mentons you […]

Also posted in programming, thinking | Comments closed

Mentons: What the Brain Runs On

By Jeff | Published: October 18, 2011

The brain runs on fuel. I discover this every evening when the night looms black through the windows and the pillow beckons. After a long day of thinking and typing and talking and listening and programming and parenting and the rest, I start to run out of steam. And yet I’m convinced that steam is […]

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Keep Taking Steps Forward

By Jeff | Published: October 17, 2011

In the last couple of posts I’ve talked about a programmer’s greatest enemy: getting stuck. I talked about the various levels of how stuck you can get, from getting stuck while trudging through documentation to getting stuck because you don’t have the resources—passwords, files—that you need to perform a task. This leads me to my […]

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Four Kinds of Stuck

By Jeff | Published: October 16, 2011

A programmer’s worst enemy is getting stuck. Getting stuck on a problem hurts your productivity. Worse than that, it hurts your joy, your confidence, and your soul. Therefore learning how to avoid getting stuck, how to recognize when you’re stuck, and how to get unstuck is a key skill in the quest of becoming a […]

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A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy

By Jeff | Published: October 14, 2011

A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. A crucial skill in programming—and one that many of my beginning game programming students lack—is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, to get out of being stuck, and to avoid getting stuck in the first place. Indeed, it’s a skill I’m still learning myself, although the contexts […]

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Practice Contempt for Shoji

By Jeff | Published: June 10, 2009

I teach a course at the Southern Methodist University’s Guildhall program on Software Development for Games. In the syllabus I have a section entitled Cryptic Advice. One of the bits of cryptic advice offered there is this: “Practice contempt for shoji.” My students usually get around to asking me what this means by the middle […]

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Spinning Up and Spinning Down

By Jeff | Published: May 26, 2009

So you want to write a novel. Or learn to play guitar. Or exercise regularly. But no matter how hard you want it, you never can seem to fit it into your schedule. You tell yourself, “If I could just write two hours a day, I could finish my novel in less than a year. […]

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