Programming

Basically the title. Would love to know whats going on in the industry :)

A lot of you reached out to me referring me. I want to thank you a lot. You guys are gems.

A special thanks to , who referred me to my current job at a FinTech startup. I owe you a beer.

The people here are damn smart and equally fun. The culture is very open and remote-first. All the founders are very approachable and don’t even mention that they are the founders. Even before I received my laptop, I receive my ticket for the company offsite.

The offsite is when I first interacted with everyone. One of my new colleagues sat next to me and I chatted with him for 3-4 hours. Later on I found that he was in fact the CEO. He didn’t even mention this once nor was there any superiority complex in him when we were chatting. This incident reinforced my decision in joining the company.

Anyways, if you are in the same boat as I was, keep your chin up and keep coding. You will make it.

Ignore the haters and focus on yourself

Peace.

Edit:

I have been a Lead Developer for more than 6 months in a company and I was given the task of hiring 2 developers myself, and it was frustrating. The amount of junior developers who don't have the slightest idea of ​​how to work with github, who have only touched a framework by watching youtube videos, who have many projects but have no idea of ​​the code they have written, who use AI to write all the code and don't understand. I understand that a junior has to be explained, taught, but seeing it from a recruiter's perspective, there is a reason why there are like 10,000 job applications and very few accepted.

It is really frustrating seeing it from this perspective.

Note: Recruitments have already been made, please do not send me messages. Also, English is not my main language, sorry for that.

I've been working on a TypeScript monorepo project with different packages, each having its own ESLint and TS config. I was using VSCode on a 16GB machine with WSL 2, but as the project grew, VSCode started hogging RAM and crashing a lot, especially with ESLint and TSServer running multiple instances and eating WSL RAM like crazy. The autocompletion became very lagging, getting definitions became slow and it got so bad that I couldn’t even restart the ESLint server sometimes.

This week, I finally tried WebStorm (had a JetBrains license lying around) and wow, it's so much smoother! Took about an hour to set up ESLint, but everything just works now, and the autocompletion is smart without even needing Copilot. I hover on any symbol and the definition is instantly there.

Interestingly, WebStorm consumes more resources than VSCode, but the extra resources it needs is worth it compared to VSCode.

Overall, I felt way more productive on WebStorm this week compared to months of struggling with VSCode.

Anyone had a similar experience moving from vscode to webstorm or JetBrains products in general ?

I had recently referred a good profile from a job seeker who had approached me on LinkedIn. I had uploaded his CV on our HR portal, as that is the process for referral we follow and not via mail or text.So, I recently found out that the person was hired a few days ago and had started working already remotely, so I reached out to HR for any update on the referral bonus, and she straight up replied that I am not eligible for any bonus as they approached him through Naukri, which is absolute BS. I spoke to the new hire on call, and he confirmed that HR mentioned on call that one of the employees had referred his CV for this role. 

How should I proceed forward now? I don't want to drag this new hire (Fresher) into this and get him into any sort of trouble. Also, the bonus is just 10000 inr. Idk why HR is acting so cheap. 

While the topic of game development stages is widely discussed, I reached out to my colleague Christine Brownell to share her unique perspective as an industry veteran with experience across mobile, console, and PC games.

She has accumulated her two decades of experience at studios like Blizzard, PlayStation London, EA’s Playfish, Scopely, and Sumo Digital, where she has held roles such as Quest Designer, Design Director, Creative Director, Game Director, and Live Operations Director.

Christine put together a 49-page guide that distills her first-hand experience and digs into the complexities of game development at each stage.

It’s the most comprehensive free resource I’ve come across by far, with lots of examples and additional resources.

This guide will help anyone looking to get into game development get a deeper understanding of the process, along with the challenges that come up at each stage.

I highly recommend checking out the full guide, as the takeaways alone won't do it justice.

But for the TL:DR folks, here are the takeaways: 

Stage 1: Ideation: This first stage of the dev cycle involves proving the game’s concept and creating a playable experience as quickly as possible with as few resources as possible.

• The ideation stage can be further broken down into four stages: 

  • Concept Brief: Your brief must cover genre, target platforms, audience, critical features at a high level, and the overall gameplay experience.

  • Discovery: The stage when you toy with ideas through brainstorming, paper prototypes and playtesting. 

  • Prototyping:  Building quick, playable prototypes is crucial to prove game ideas with minimal resources before moving to the next stage.

    • Prototypes shouldn’t be used for anything involving long-term player progression, metagame, or compulsion loop.

  • Concept Pitch Deck: A presentation to attract interest from investors. 

    • Word of caution: Do not show unfinished or rough prototypes to investors—many of them are unfamiliar with the process of building games, and they don’t have the experience to see what it might become.

Stage 2: Pre-production

• Pre-production is where the team will engage in the groundwork of planning, preparation, and targeted innovation to make the upcoming production stage as predictable as possible.

• One of the first things that needs to happen in pre-production is to ensure you have a solid leadership team. 

• When the game vision is loosely defined, each team member might have a slightly different idea about what they’re building, and making the team lose focus, especially as new hires and ideas are added to the mix.

• The design team should thoroughly audit the feature roadmap and consider the level of risk and unknowns, dependencies within the design, and dependencies across different areas of the team.

  • For example, even if a feature is straightforward in terms of design, it may be bumped up in the list if it is expensive from an art perspective or complex from a technical perspective.

Stage 3: Production:

• Scoping & Creating Milestones

  • Producers must now engage in a scoping pass of features and content, ensuring a clear and consistent process for the team to follow—making difficult choices about what’s in and what’s not.

  • Forming milestones based on playable experience goals is an easy way to make the work tangible and easy to understand for every discipline on the team.

  • Examples:

    • The weapon crafting system will be fully functional and integrated into the game.

    • The entire second zone will be fully playable and polished.

• Scale the Team

  • Production is when the team will scale up to its largest size. Much of this expansion will be from bringing on designers and artists to create the content for the game.

  • You can bring on less-experienced staff to create this content if you have well-defined systems and clear examples already in place at the quality you’d like to hit.

  • If you start to hear the word “siloing” or if people start to complain that they don’t understand what a different part of the team is doing—that’s a warning sign that you need to pull everyone together and realign everyone against the vision.

  • Testing internally and externally is invaluable in production: it helps to find elusive bugs, exploits, and unexpected complexities. 

Stage 4: Soft Launch:

• There is no standard requirement for soft launches, but the release should contain enough content and core features so that your team can gauge the audience’s reaction.

• Sometimes, cutting or scoping back features and content is the right call when something just isn’t coming together. 

  • It’s always better to release a smaller game that has a higher level of polish rather than a larger game that is uneven in terms of how finished it feels.

• It cannot be overemphasized that it’s best not to move into a soft launch stage until the team feels like the game is truly ready for a wider audience.

  • While mobile game developers tend to release features well before they feel finished, this approach isn’t right for every audience or platform. 

  • Console and PC players tend to have higher expectations and will react much more negatively to anything they perceive as unfinished.

• Understanding the vision—what that game is and what it isn’t—will be more important than ever at this point.

Here is the full guide: 

As always, thanks for reading.

Is Rust used in the tax software industry? No. But will it become more important in the future? Also no.

For everybody else (i.e. mainly cats and dolphins), I made the Rust bindings and SDK for the Elster Rich Client (Eric) [1, 2, 3]. Eric is shared C library provided by the German tax administration which is integrated into a tax application.

The Eric bindings were generated using bindgen [4] which was a very smooth experience.

The functionality of the Eric SDK is currently kept simple (see ). It takes an XML file in the XBRL standard for a specified taxonomy, like the company balance sheet, income statement, or any other event in the context of tax declaration, and checks the provided data for plausibility. The validated XML file can then be sent to the tax authorities.

Are you aware of any other tax-related projects in Rust? Let me know.

[1]

[2]

[3]

[4]

Just lost one of our biggest clients yesterday (cancelled the majority of their services). They have decided to move their custom WordPress build over to Wix as well as all of their ecommerce sites over to Wix. For in house ease of management. Essentially they’ve switched from a fully custom WordPress build down to a hacked together Wix site. Therefore cancelling maintenance, future work, maintenance retainers as well as managed hosting. Also closed down their custom intranet we built to be replaced by a Facebook group. They’re still keeping some services (60k revenue approx).

This is a loss of around $83k of revenue. They were admittedly somewhat a pain (asking for quotes to be reduced) and new work has dried up over the last few months from them but they were still an overall good client in terms of recurring revenue. Currently can weather it due to building healthy cash reserves but how did everyone else recover from a situation like this? What did you do first to start landing new bigger clients to replace the work lost?

This is my code. I am doing a Game Jam and I have not slept since yesterday morning. This cursed statement just flowed from my fingers, and I had to marvel at it. Then I decided I should share it. (probably a mistake, if I am being honest.)