defdac

With 10+ years of being a professional programmer I think you will automatically get the insight of being agnostic is really the only way of surviving and keep your passion for your work.

Those who fail at this will stop working as a programmer, move out in the woods, build a cabin and live happy as a farmer.

When you're young you will inevitably always have an attraction for styles that ring the most true to you. You have one single hammer you have learnt to use or even worse, have heard really good programmers at Hacker News prefer to use, and therefore you use this hammer for everything.

You are a poser.

Most programmers have been there. Posers can be extremely sharp and useful if they get to do what they're good at, but they are posers nevertheless and at the start of a humbling journey to agnosticism - getting shit done instead of bickering and posing.

Reading this gave me goose bumps since you managed to describe and explain something I've been thinking about for a long time.

"Never memorize something that you can look up." [Einstein]

It's only true if you work/learn/pair program with people that think this is true.

The IR-filter most cameras have is a real problem too. I have a webcam with the IR-filter removed.

I'm currently learning Blender. It's an open source 3D-modeling program with one of the most non-intuitive GUIs ever created. It's like the Vim/Emacs of 3D-creation. Being able to just grab a 3D-object with your hands and kneed it to the shape you want would be freakishly amazing.

The thing with unity is that it's almost so easy to grasp that when you sit down with it, it's almost not necessary. You can spend time thinking about actual implementation details while Unity does all the "boring" stuff. That said - when I started searching for specific problems I had the community had all the answers and then some. Another awesome thing is that you can do really complex stuff, like intricate shaders, if you want. Completing a full featured 3D-game have never felt so close to me.

"Did you help somebody solve a problem? Write it down. Did you connect with a colleague or friend? Write it down. Did you make somebody smile? Write it down."

This sound more like pride/fulfillment rather than gratitude?

Since Unity3D already can deploy to Androd platforms I would venture to guess that we will see quite alot of games ready for the launch of Ouya.

These tips doesn't feel crisis-specific to me.

"You have to ask yourself: "Do I understand why my program is doing X?"" "I almost never use a debugger." "And if your program is so complex that you need a debugger [simplify]"

To me, being afraid of a debugger is like being afraid of actually knowing exactly what is going on - being lazy and just read logs and guessing what might have gone wrong, instead of letting the debugger scream in your face all the idiotic mistakes you have made.

I would argue that using the debugger is being lazy in an intelligent way, instead of spending hours reading endless logs trying to puzzle together logic the debugger can show you directly.