Yes, those are the Game Engine Black Books (Doom|Wolfenstein) by Fabien Sanglard. Highly recommended for anyone interested in games, programming, and history. They are amazing time capsules of those games and the development environments that produced them. I think/hope he’s working on GEBB: Quake and I’m so excited for him to eventually release it!
Yeah, after 22 years at Microsoft in a senior position, you should be able to retire and do whatever the fuck you want as a hobby. I very highly doubt this guy will ever make significant money from goose farming.
My grandfather is/was an electrician for over 60 years. Worked on very important projects in New York City. This rubbed off on me growing up. I spent much of my childhood taking things apart, figuring out how they worked, and putting them back together how I liked. I’ve been working on both hardware and software since I was 11. Had the privilege to study CS formally in high school, and Computer Engineering in university.
Good timing mostly got me into farming, especially since interest rates fell to the floor during the pandemic. Had enough to buy the acreage I wanted, and the wife was interested in helping out. We grow a variety of things now, and not just plants. For example we sell Honey, Soaps, Walnuts, and Mushrooms. It can be hard on the body to be so active all the time, but it is more satisfying than a monitor staring back at you at 3am because of some small incident.
I continue to tinker, and assist startups in my spare time, I can’t imagine I will ever stop programming.
Just try being uneducated and working in a dead end factory job while having hated life all your life anyway!
Much fun! -46/10 would never recommend!
I wish I was forced into programming… I tried on my own and just don’t have the mind for it, I find it incredibly boring. All my friends are in the field and all work from home wherever the hell they want to live. I’m stuck in a VHCOL area with shit income and 0 potential to increase it :(
Yeah that sounds way more enjoyable, but first you need the 250k and up salary that a principal engineer at MS makes for 20 years, then you have plenty of equity to focus on whatever your hobby is
You spent all those years down in the trenches implementing bullshit designs an architect came up with, positive you could do better if you just got the chance. Then you go to graduate school to get the qualifications companies say you need to be an architect. You receive a masters degree. You’re your companies leading expert on software design. You get promoted to architect.
That’s when you find out the truth. All those previous architects left for the same reason you someday will. It wasn’t the previous architects making the terrible decisions that frustrated you. It was the marketing team and the CEO telling the CTO that the software product must have certain buzzwords present in the design. Those buzzwords offer no value to what your software product is meant to accomplish. But if you don’t put them in the designs, they’ll fire you and hire someone who will play their games.
Eventually, you can’t take it anymore. Having interfaced with the upper levels of your company, and having the understanding of systems engineering you do, you realize that every software firm will be this. There is nowhere you can go that will be better. You start saving.
Your goal is to save enough money to purchase a small plot of land and put an organic farm on it. Your convictions for this farm are simple: it must be able to feed your family. This may not be exclusively what you envision for it, and you may not even intend for it to be the only source of food for your family, but it will help you be less reliant on the kinds of corporation you’ve come to know and come to see as irrevocably evil.
And then sometimes, you get people like this in the post. Who find enough success farming to focus their energy on it exclusively.