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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • I think the size may have more to do with the team not splitting up the Unreal build paks. Haven’t checked how well it’s actually split up, but I can say that changing even one small thing could result in a giant update if that build has like one pak file with all the things in it. There are ways to configure it in the build but it’s not a magic toggle either. Worked with a studio handing off UE builds before that didn’t build the game in a split friendly way and it made every upload to S3 take forever cause there were only like two really giant paks.

    Also makes me wonder, does Steam not do diff patch style updates for changes within individual files? If not, that could save a ton of bandwidth.










  • I don’t think the new strategy of injecting ads directly into the video stream can be defeated in realtime though. It’s like how you cannot defeat tv ads…you can blank the screen, or record and restitch without the ads, but the content itself has the ad. YouTube is a bit different where you can theoretically skip ahead, but your device has to tell Youtube that it wants to skip ahead in order to actually even get the video content, and youtube can look at request timestamps to know you didn’t see the whole injected ad and just re-inject it in the video stream.



  • Yeah management is totally backwards there; it’s like the building manager on a construction project going “all electrical needs to be done in X weeks”, but realistically they have no direct control over that deadline being met by declaring an arbitrary deadline. The unfortunate difference is that if you do a shitty job wiring a building, you’ll fail inspection and have to spend more time and money fixing it. Software can often hobble along; there aren’t strict enforcements for quality that the business can legally ignore, so you’ll always have sad defeated devs go “okay boss, we’ll skip the things we need to get this done faster for you (I hate this job and don’t care about the product’s long term success)”. Having a steady supply of those people will slowly kill a software company.

    In the past, I’ve dealt with estimate pushback not by explaining what necessary work can be removed like tests, documentation, or refactoring, but by talking through ways to divide the project more effectively to get more people involved (up to a point, a la mythical man month). That seems to go more proactively. Then we look at nixing optional requirements. But, I’ve also usually dealt with mostly competent engineering management.


  • The thing that frustrates me about developers who feel powerless over technical debt is…who is actually stopping them from dealing with it? They way I see it, as a software engineer, your customer is sales/marketing/product/etc. They don’t care about the details or maintenance, they just want the thing. And that’s okay. But you have to include the cost of managing technical debt into the line items the customer wants. That is, estimate based on doing the right things, not taking shortcuts. Your customer isn’t reading your commits. If they were, they wouldn’t need you.

    It would be bizarre if your quote for getting your house siding redone included line items for changing the oil on the work truck, organizing the shop, or training new crew members. But those costs of business are already factored into what you pay at the end of the day.






  • I went with a tiny build in a Fractal Terra. It still fit a 7900XTX and I’ve been super happy with the look and form factor on my desk. If you need details about the cooler and other parts, I can share a PCPartPicker link. There’s a bit of an art to squeezing all your component goodies in but it should be more than enough for a very powerful, extensible build.