robashton2's comments

robashton2 | 11 years ago | on: MSBuild is now open source on GitHub

I got loads of time for that, but I've also suffered at the hands of MSBuild as have thousands of others so the PR seemed like a funny troll at the time.

Seriously - I remember at one client there was a specific machine set up to edit the build on because it was the only one that could open the workflow editor without crashing. Why there was a workflow editor to edit MSBuild stuff I don't know but that's that world in a nutshell.

robashton2 | 12 years ago | on: Working for free and what it taught me

"then they'll get on that stuff and make it happen providing they have some similar experience and you have an in-house knowledge pool for them to draw on." <-- some similar experience is probably another way of saying that.

If you asked me tomorrow to go and start doing system programming in a language I knew well, I'd probably be screwed. Ask me to work on a database engine, compiler or web app and I'd be okay.

I'm mainly focusing that ire on the typical enterprise stuff LOB stuff, where it truely is all the same and just because you'd been writing Foo v1 for three years doesn't mean you won't be able to write Bar v300

robashton2 | 12 years ago | on: Working for free and what it taught me

Maybe - I can't help but feel you're all putting C on a pedestal though - thinking you're immune from memory management issues because you're not using C seems a bit weird.

I feel confident that if I was asked to do C at one of these gigs I'd have been able to deliver something useful. Perhaps less if it was C++ because it's a bit swiss-army knife and there are a lot more "don'ts" to pick up.

robashton2 | 12 years ago | on: Working for free and what it taught me

Yeah, it didn't see that important - the internet is quite a good place for doing things like this - thanks to Twitter and other places where people share things the calendar was booked up for 6 months within a couple of weeks

robashton2 | 12 years ago | on: Working for free and what it taught me

Perhaps I miswrote, I lost a lot of money doing this - expenses were travel and finding me somewhere to live, everything else in life costs a lot of money which came from my own account.

robashton2 | 12 years ago | on: Working for free and what it taught me

Considering how much it usually costs to hire a contractor, this really is free. If you win tickets to a concert you still have to pay to get there, but the tickets are still free.

Paying a couple hundred quid to hire me for two weeks is free. When I said expenses, it was the cost of getting there and putting me somewhere to sleep (not hotels mostly, thankfully).

By charging that small amount, it means they're serious about bringing me in because it demonstrates commitment.

I paid for my own upkeep over this time and burned through the best part of 25k EUR - all worth it.

robashton2 | 13 years ago | on: Lessons learned building a multiplayer game in NodeJS and WebGL

Hey, I noticed the traffic spike and came to say hello.

The thing about a chatroom and load, is that your server is effectively just message passing, and if there is any CPU spike, that is all it is - a spike, which VPSs for the most part are fine with.

When you are executing physics and logic 30 times a second constantly regardless of load (so I made a mistake in phrasing there in my blog post), then you will be throttled on a cheap VPS because you're no longer being a good citizen - which was my point in that post if I recall correctly.

To my recollection, this hasn't got much to do with memory at all. I hope this clarifies what I meant to say a bit more.

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