anonymouse2Nov 8, 2024

How Good at Math Does a Programmer Need to Be?

https://sh.itjust.works/post/27784216

Narrating Travel - sh.itjust.works

Pretty short and sweet, how do you successfully narrate travel between points of interest as a GM without it being all hurky-jerky? I’m imagining attempting to narrate the epic travel scenes in Lord of the Rings, where they travel for days in fast-forward with nothing really interesting happening, only to then suddenly have time reel down to normal when something is about to happen. Every time I try this in a game though it just feels awkward and abrupt, while also clearly indicating to the players that something is going to happen. Is there a way to make this a more smooth and natural transition?

Show threadkamstrup

Being comfortable with basic back-of-the-envelope math can be a huge benefit. (Full disclosure: i am a math major who is now a programmer)

Over my career I have several examples of projects that have saved weeks worth of dev time because someone could predict the result with some basic calculations. I also have several examples where I have shown people some basic math showing that their idea is never gonna work, they don’t listen and do it anyway, and I see them 1 month later and the project failed in the way i predicted.

A popular (and wise) saying is that “Weeks of work can save you hours of meetings”. I think the same is true for basic math. “Weeks of coding can save you minutes of calculation”.

You can definitely be a successful programmer career without great math skills. Math is a tool that can help you be more effective.

Nov 10, 2024 at 9:57amWeb
Show threadicermigaNov 10, 2024
Can you share the full story of the projects that you could predict could fail using maths?
Show threadkamstrupNov 17, 2024

Can’t divulge too many details, but one example was when we had 2 options for solving a problem: 1. The “easy” way, storing a bunch small blobs to s3 as a job was running on an embedded device, or 2. The slightly tricky, implement streaming of said data on the device (not as easy as it sounds).

We went with option 1, the easy one, because it was deemed faster bang for the buck. I did some basic math showing that the bandwidth required upload the high number of blobs to s3 within our time budget was not possible on our uplink.

After we spend a month failing on 1., it was clear that we hit the predicted problem. Eventuelly we implement option 2.