March 2016 – Blog Pav Blog

For the last several weeks I’ve been obsessed with one TV show. It’s changed my viewing habits, my buying habits, and my computing habits. Technically it’s not even a “TV show” (if your definition of that term doesn’t include content created by non-professionals that is only available for free over the Internet).

But for me, a more or less typical Gen-Xer, Handmade Hero by game tool developer Casey Muratori has me totally enthralled as only must see TV can enthrall. I’m hooked and I simply must watch all 256+ episodes of Handmade Hero before I die (in about 1,406 Saturdays according to the How Many Saturdays app).

So first off let me explain a few things. Unless you are an aspiring retro game programmer or aging C/C++ programmer Handmade Hero will seem tedious at best and irrelevant at worst. There are much better and more modern ways to make a video game (like SpriteKit on iOS or Unity on any OS) but Casey promises to demonstrate live on Twitch.TV how to write a complete video game from scratch, without modern frameworks, that will run on almost anything with a CPU. He’s starting with Windows but promises Mac OS X, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.

This is a bold promise! When I first heard of Handmade hero, almost 2 years ago I ignored it. I didn’t know who Casey Muratori was and the Internet is littered with hundreds of these solo projects that tend to fissile out like ignobly failed Kickstarter projects.

But a comment in Hacker News caught my eye about a month ago. Casey had delivered hundreds of hours of live coding with explanations of arcane C, Windows, and video programming techniques! It’s all archived on YouTube and he’s still steaming almost every night! Awesomesause!

So I had to check it out. I started with Casey’s first video, Intro to C on Windows, and ate it up. I had to pound through the rest of that week’s archive. Because I have a family and a very demand job and kids and cats I had to purchase a subscription to YouTube Red so that I could watch Casey’s videos on or offline. Google is getting $10 bucks a month off me of because of Casey!

My keyboarding fingers ached to follow along coding as Casey coded. I used to be a C/C++ programmer. I used to do pointer arithmetic and #DEFINEs and even Win32 development! Could I too write a video game from scratch with no frameworks? I had to buy a Windows laptop and find out! Thus Dell got me to buy a refurbished XPS 13 because of Casey!

Even Microsoft benefited. I subscribed to Office 365 for OneDrive so I could easily backup my files and use the Office apps since I’m keeping my MacBook Pro at the office these days. I have discovered that a Windows PC does almost everything a MacBook does because of Casey!

I usually have less than an hour a day to watch TV so I’ve had to optimize my entertainment and computing environment around Handmade hero because at this rate I will never catch up to the live stream! But I’m having a blast and learning deep insights from a journeyman coder.

What could an old school game coder teach an old battle-scared industry vet like me? More than I could have imagined.

First of call Casey is an opinionated software developer with a narrow focus and an idiosyncratic coding style. He is not wasting his time following the endless trends of modern coding. He is not worried about which new JavaScript dialect he is going master this month or which new isometric web framework he is going wrestle with. He codes in C with some C++ extensions, he uses Emacs as his editor, he builds with batch files, and debugs with VisualStudio. While these tools have changed over the years Casey has not. He is nothing if not focused.

Thus Casey is a master of extemporaneous coding while explaining–the kind that every software engineer fears during Google and Facebook interviews. This means Casey has his coding skills down cold. He is unflappable.

Casey doesn’t know everything and his technique for searching MSDN while writing code shows how fancy IDEs with auto-completion are actually bad for us developers. He uses the Internet (and Google search) not as a crutch to copy and paste code but as a tool to dig deep into how APIs and compilers actually work. There seems to be nothing Casey can’t code himself.

Casey makes mistakes and correct himself. He writes // Notes and // TODOs in his code to follow up with as if he is working with team. Casey interacts with his audience at the end of every stream and is not shy about either dismissing their questions or embracing them. Casey is becoming a better, more knowledgeable programming before our eyes and we’re helping him while he is helping us.

Casey is not cool or suave on camera. He swigs almond milk and walks away off screen to get stuff during the stream. But nothing about Handmade Hero would be substantially improved if Casey hired a professional video production team. In point of fact, any move away from his amateur production values would be met with suspicion from his audience. Any inorganic product placement would fail. Dell, Microsoft, and Google should support him but stay the heck away least they burst the bubble of pure peer-to-peer show-and-tell that surrounds Casey.

I have 249 videos go to (and Casey has not stopped making videos)! I still don’t know if he delivers on his promise and creates an actual video game from scratch. (Please! No spoilers!) But I already know far more than I did about real-world game development where the gritty reality of incompatible file systems and operating platform nuances make Object Oriented Programming and interpreted bytecode luxuries a working developer can’t afford.

If there was an award for most improved in the world of tech I would award it to Windows 10. While I am a daily Mac user, I am no stranger to Windows. Actually, let me correct myself. I live inside iOS, work in Mac OS, play around on Windows, and occationally find need of an Android device. I think that makes me a good judge of where Windows 10 sits in comparison to all the major operating systems offered today. (Linux, yes I used to be into you, but Mac OS is more than enough UNIX for me.)

I’m old enough to remember when Macs were relegated to the less serious passions, graphics and science labs, while Windows machines were the sturdy beasts that bore our burdens during work. Ironically the situation seems to be reversed. If I have a job to do, that can’t be done on a phone, I need a Mac. If I want to fool around in virtual reality or inside an MMO at 60 FPS, I need a Windows PC. Windows 10 is Microsoft’s near miss at reclaiming the dull and boring world of the workhorse personal computer.

I had reason to buy a non-gaming PC laptop last week. I’m following along with Handmade Hero and since Casey Muratori is using a Windows machine to demo how to write a game from scratch I wanted to do the same. Via Amazon I bought a decent Dell XPS 13, refurbished, at a 50% discount. It’s a lot like a MacBook Air: Light, beautiful no-touch screen, and well constructed feel. The keyboard is a little loose as compared to a MacBook. And like a MacBook Air the graphic card and CPU are under powered but it’s totally usable for software development and the processing of words, numbers, emails, and webpages. This blog post is being written on it.

Windows 10 is Microsoft’s response to Mac OS and iOS. And it’s pretty easy to see that Apple is watching closely what Microsoft is doing with Windows 10 and discovering new ways to improve Mac OS and iOS. However, Redmond has to do a better job of learning from Cupertino.

Windows 10 is innovative and interesting but has many odd holes, rough patches, and weird leftover bits from Windows of the past. It feels rushed and as if there is only a small band of engineers behind it. It’s a tad ugly as if the UX designers called out sick a few days before polishing the new look and feel. If I wasn’t a 30 year veteran of Windows and PCs I’d be lost and confused when it comes to navigating around and installing software. As it is, I’m “Binging” basic operations where on the Mac I’d just be able to wing it.

Let me give you a concrete example…

Windows 10 has a system wide spell checking feature. While I was typing this blog post, in the sleek Edge web browser using the web-based WordPress text editor, I had to turn off Windows 10 spell checking. It was underlying entire paragraphs with red wavy lines! And yet I still have spell checking. So who is doing the spell checking if I turned it off? A mystery!

Another mystery is that at first I could not find the place to turn off spell checking in the Windows 10 Setting panel. I had to ask Cortana. She’s a nice lady and all but I pride myself on being able to find things in computer operating system. I now know that spell checking is found under Settings->Devices->Typing. What threw me was “devices” (that makes me think of something like a printer, a separate device) and the lack of the term “keyboard” anywhere in the UX.

It’s as if the person who designed the Windows 10 Settings panel is a young AI just figuring out object from subject and parts from wholes. I keep running into little stumbles like this along the way as use Windows. I’m sure there is a punch list at Microsoft with a thousand tiny little fixes that are not mission critical but would make a big difference in how the end-user’s experience of Windows 10 flows.

So, good job Microsoft. Better than I expected. Keep it up. I suggest hiring a really mean, obsessive, and uncompromising UX designer and putting her or him in charge of Windows 11.