See what I'm working on
I am used to knowing every detail of every layer of a product, but in my current role, it seems like I am at a point where it is becoming too much, and I have to compromise keeping up-to-date with one area in order to keep tabs on another. It seems like this happens to even the best engineers:
I probably had my personal “moment of truth” around the beginning of Doom 3’s development, when it became clear that it is no longer possible to deeply understand every single part of a modern application. There is just too much. Nevertheless, I found that I could still enjoy my work when confined to a subset of the entire project, and I have thus remained committed to the high end. However, the appeal of smaller systems still lingers.
-@ID_AA_Carmack, taken from his Nov 02 2007 .plan
For me, it’s the opposite. I still thirst for learning new things at the lower level.
I was inspired to start incorporating .plan files, outdated as they may be, into my routine. I primarily use Windows because I find it tedious to keep switching between the Mac and Windows when I am in video game mode and building mode. So I started by implementing my own fingerd in Rust for use in Windows, as well as incorporating it into my Obsidian/Astro workflow. Although I ended up dockerizing this into a very small linux container and deploying to my k8s cluster, the code runs and compiles on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and would run on bare metal as well.
Now you can keep tabs on what I’m currently working on by just running: