Even if it was fun I often felt it was useless because the skills I was acquiring were only applicable for game development and that was something I was not interested in.
It was quite a shock to me when I found myself working on a WebGL demo for Google² and all what I had learnt in the demoscene paid off (and has continued paying off ever since!³⁴).
1. https://ricardocabello.com/
Imagine how much better off our society would be if every adult was grounded in the fundamentals of political science, ethics, economics, and philosophy.
An educated electorate demands higher quality candidates. The populist demagogues of the last several decades wouldn't have stood a chance.
It is about coverage and opportunity in our lives.
The more skills one picks up, the greater the chance any one of them will make a big difference.
Here is a crazy example:
Paper tape. In the late 80's, I worked in some smaller shops using paper tape to drive their CNC machines. I learned all about it and can patch, the whole nine.
A few years ago a call for help found it's way to me and it turns out there are STILL people driving CNC machines off paper tape! I was able to fix the setup and get them running, edit a few programs and repair a damaged tape or few. Made a nice bit of extra cash.
Restating their (apparent) point more explicitly: there are no technical skills that have probability 0% of being used; there are many (most) technical skills that have probability less than 100% of being used. There are cost-benefit tradeoffs to consider, but assuming the cost is low enough, it's better (useful) to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
I believe my lego play informed my career in software development, but that might be a stretch.
I'd argue that this kind of language isn't even right. It's not only that you don't know when you need something, you don't even know when you use it. If we've learned one thing from the success of ML systems it's that the proper representation of knowledge is extremely complex and connected. Everything influences everything else. You can't learn "10%" of a language, or "10% of programming", as if there exists some chunk neatly separated from the rest.
It's much more likely everything you learned contributes to most of what you do, even if we're not actively aware of it. You can't learn x% of Mandarin by learning y% of the words, it's not even appropriate to separate anything into useful or useless. Almost everything you pick up just illuminates your mental model just a little bit more.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.ibm.pc.demos/c/TR8hmM3I...
My demos were my resume (CV) at the time. I remember Jez San of Argonaut (Starfox) contacting me and wanting me to come interview for a development position. I was 16 IIRC.
A year or so after that I became a professional game developer. In fact, the game I was working on was changed from 2D to 3D overnight and I pulled out my demo source and ported the whole 3D engine over in two weeks:
https://youtu.be/t2kdKB18c7I?t=330
Demos really force you to learn everything there is to know about how a modern computer system works, CPU, RAM, ROM, bus, video, etc. That knowledge will remain invaluable.
I mostly do web dev in C#, but any time I write a single line of code my brain is thinking in the background "how many opcodes will this be? what about this branch? am I making an extra copy of this variable for no reason?"
For C# specifically, if you want to scratch the itch, there is a way :) If you are using VS, you can install Disasmo extension and disassemble arbitrary methods with SHIFT+ALT+D (keep in mind it's ready-to-run-like codegen which does not have all optimizations).
You can also go further, and use `DOTNET_JitDisasm='methodName'` env variable - in this case you will see how method transitions through all compilation tiers (if it gets promoted past Tier 0). And last but not least, if you build your .NET binary with NativeAOT, you can just use standard disassembler, debugger or profiler you would use for C++ binaries.
My (devops) team did the tooling, but we've worked very closely with QA, and while they didn't get the pages, both teams felt that they shared the responsibility of making the final product (well basically a cool tech demo) rock solid for the viewers. In 4.5 years there I've touched ca 600 projects, but I agree with you - it was still easier than doing the frontend work. Arguably less glory but definitely more life.
I remember your 3 Dreams of Black experiment when it came out, that was awesome work!
Thank you for these!
The first abstract scene (about 30secs in) is basically r08028 but less cool :-)