As a web developer this looks very complicated, reading stuff like this makes me feel useless. I wonder whether game developers feel the same reading about the web stack.
I'm a graphics programmer at Unity (the game engine), and recently I toyed around with Rails. That made me realize how much of assumed knowledge and jargon is in any particular field.
As a complete noob, all the information in Rails case sounds like "yeah you just rake your gems, bundle the capistrano and don't forget to bootstrap the angular node" -- stop, WHAT?! And all this while trying to do a very simple "hello, world" CRUD app.
I'd imagine graphics programming sounds exactly like that from outside, just with different words. "Oh yeah, you just swizzle your lanes, dispatch the predication queries and don't forget to Fresnel your BRDFs" (no, this sentence does not make any sense whatsoever).
Of course if I'd spend even a month in the Rails/web field, I could at least navigate without bumping into everything. Spending a year or two would probably make me comfortable. Same with game or graphics programming. The author of original blog post has been doing this for 20 years...
Yeah that's exactly how your jargon sounds to me :) I fiddled with Unity everyone was saying it's "simple"/"easy" ... Sure it is :)))
You know, it's funny how people out of our industry perceive us (at least in my experience) - I mean you say you're a programmer and it's immediately presumed that you just know computers and coding, but we have so many branches, languages, platforms at times it's absolutely overwhelming.
Outside of the basics of programming (you know algorithms, runtime analysis, basic code structure) we have almost nothing in common. It now starts to make sense why the big companies interview in these areas.
>yeah you just rake your gems, bundle the capistrano and don't forget to bootstrap the angular node" -- stop, WHAT?! And all this while trying to do a very simple "hello, world" CRUD app.
Most game developers are not this good -- I spent some time in the game industry (coming from a webdev background) and it was important for me to know C++, but I didn't really have much graphics experience and I was still really useful. Gameplay and UI code end up being a huge part of what goes into games, and you don't need this level of expertise for that.
That said, graphics engine development is very technically and mathematically advanced, I would say much more so than the web stack.
Yeah, I see how a lot of the skill will apply in both fields, however they feel a universe apart (at least for me). I remember trying to do a pretty simple game (think space invaders clone) in Java and if I'm honest - I struggled (a lot). Now when it comes to the web (both frond-end and back-end) I'm flying. Having said all of that, It might be just that I'm a shitty programmer.
