AldousHaxley

Also: https://www.formgraph.com - a bit richer (multiple layers, drawing tools, social features, etc)

Cool! I built something similar a while back. A bit more structured (creating accounts and such), but with a bigger variety of drawing tools, and some social features like following, project collaboration, upvotes/downvotes, and chat. https://www.formgraph.com

https://www.formgraph.com - real-time collaborative drawing in vue.js; drawing client alone is over 5k LOC of Vue.js.

I wish I knew earlier that I had enough knowledge to build production quality applications. I had this idea early on that I had to attain some level of mastery that was always just outside of my reach, and that the only remedy to that was learning everything possible under the sun. But after spending years trying to get to that point, I realized that I could have been building and shipping products that whole time. If I could do the last decade over, that realization would have the most profound impact.

I remember those anxious days before Longhorn's release. MS was making a lot of weird threats back then. All the "trusted computing" stuff, as well as the thinly veiled attempts at killing OpenGL on Windows. Despite my above waxing nostalgic about the API, I haven't built anything with D3D in years, for precisely the issues you mentioned. API design quality and performance are important, but they are far from the only factors that go into making such a decision.

bgfx looks really cool, thanks for letting me know about it!

GL 3.x is my current go to for the case of needing simple immediate mode 3D rendering. But it's still Bring Your Own Matrices/Texture Loading/Text Rendering/Model Loading, and D3D9 + D3DX had that all in a nice package. Like I said, stitching this stuff together isn't the hardest thing ever, but it's nice to have a basic set of boilerplate that's idiomatically consistent and works out of the box.

Those are higher level scene graphs. D3D9 was an immediate mode API with some helper libraries, so you still were in control of your app's rendering architecture.

D3D9 is my all-time favorite 3D API. It was at that sweet spot of being powerful enough that you could do stunning things with it (the Xbox 360 generation is effectively D3D9-level hardware), and it was simple enough that amateurs and hobbyists (and high school kids, as I was at the time) could dive in and get stuff on the screen relatively quickly. D3DX had some handy helper libraries for loading models, doing transforms, and loading textures. I get the benefits afforded by subsequent iterations, and nowadays Vulkan and D3D12, but their interfaces are so optimized toward specialists, and it would be nice if more was in place to cover that middle ground use case between "I don't need a full-on 3D game engine, but I don't need to worry about low level GPU stuff either." Of the new APIs out there, I feel like Metal is the only one approaching layperson usability, and it's trapped in the world of Mac and iOS. Of course you can stitch together something that looks like an open source equivalent of the old D3D9 SDK yourself from things like glm and AssImp, but it's nice to have all that in one package.

I get the value of garbage collectors, but honestly until Go I wasn't too fond of them, as I'd find myself spending about as much time thinking about memory management in Java as in C. At least with C you don't have the same lack of determinism as you do with traditional GC languages.

I find recent language trends interesting. Moving away from VMs to native binaries, away from Java-style GCs and embracing ARC and smart pointers. I have a strong bias toward minimalism, so I like the trend. If it serves to remind people that CPU time and memory, while incredibly cheap, isn't free, then all the better.

This is a really encouraging trend. For all the things I love about iOS (not to mention all the years supporting myself on iOS dev work), I love the fact that on desktop platforms, developers can just write a program, throw it up on the Internet, and have people use it or even pay for it without any middleman.

I don't have some deep moral objection to software walled gardens (if that fits your use requirements, more power to you!), but if that model ever wins out, it will be a sad day for innovation. Software's one of the most powerful tools in recent history for disruption, and having a centralized entity wield control over that creates a dangerous bottleneck for this relatively new, extremely powerful medium for human expression. Good to see that, on at least some level, the market agrees with me.

Yeah, collaborative drawing is kind of old hat, but when you can use the context of the modern, social web to provide some new modes of interaction around it, it can be interesting again. Same applies to more mundane things like text.

Not quite the same, but my startup, Formgraph[0], also does public, real-time collaborative drawing. I even did a similar write-up about the stack behind it the other day[1]. Looks like they're relying on Cassandra and Redis. I went with RethinkDB. Should probably do a write-up about the front end in the future.

[0] https://www.formgraph.com

[1] https://medium.com/@JohnWatson/real-time-collaboration-with-...

YES! So many things to read, and I hate having a million tabs open at once. Even if I don't get around to something until months later, bookmarks are an indispensable tool.

https://www.formgraph.com - collaborative creation platform

The goal is to create a social media platform that does for content creation what previous social networks have done for distribution. Create in an open space, collaborate dynamically, and remix any other content on the platform.

Building a social, collaborative creation platform. Starting with vector images, with other media types coming soon: https://www.formgraph.com

Working on a market where users can sell prints of collaborated-on works. Also in the process of building similar web based tools for composing music.

Also, I'm dangerously close to running out of money and having to go back to getting a job, so if you have any full stack web or iOS work you want done on contract, reach out to me! (jwatson@formgraph.com)

This is the first iteration of an idea I've had brewing for a while. The broader vision is to have a hybrid social network/repository with web-based tools that can be used to collaboratively edit any kind of media. I'm starting small with vector illustrations, but the important aspects of this are the ability to openly create and collaborate in real time, and having a corpus of material that you can frictionlessly remix from with attribution.

I wrote a blog post that goes into a bit more detail regarding the intent behind this project: https://medium.com/@JohnWatson/formgraph-collaborative-creat...

As for the current state of things, I'm well aware that the experience leaves quite a bit to be desired on mobile. I'm not really sure what my mobile strategy is going to be yet. I could optimize the HTML5 editor or opt to create native iOS and Android apps. Also, I'm making decreasing project load times a priority. There's so much work that could be done to make this a fluid experience, but, baby steps.

For anyone interested in the stack, the app server is written in Go, and uses RethinkDB for real time stuff, and Postgres for CRUD stuff. The client side is pretty light on frameworks, but Vue.js and JQuery make appearances in quite a few places.

Right? I don't get the mindset of Microsoft having to support an antiquated product line over a decade past its expiration date because a few business IT customers are incompetent at writing client software and keeping their systems up to date. It's not like all of this is coming out from nowhere.

An easy solution to the problem would be to stop being a racist piece of shit, or else own up to it and accept the social consequences.

Another idea would be to have user ratings and feedback. I'm not sure if these services already do something like this, as I've never used them, but it could give hosts and drivers a means of rating their users so that they have some additional criteria by which to judge whether they want to loan their resources to a particular customer. That won't really solve the problem of new black customers who would have no prior rating, though. Maybe a criminal background check for customers is in order if people are really worried about being robbed or assaulted or some other nonsense. Of course that could cost time and money and could destroy the convenience factor of such services. A real bummer of a problem. I wish people were better.

I would so get on this if I were near Harlem! This has actually encouraged me to seek out opportunities to do this sort of thing closer where I live.

As someone who has felt mostly sour grapes toward Microsoft for introducing D3D in the first place instead of adopting OpenGL, it's nice to read a convincing rationalization for why that wasn't done initially, coming from someone who was involved in the process.

Reading this made me feel good. I feel like not enough hackers in my generation appreciate some of the history surrounding hacker culture. I read Levy's books a million times as an adolescent, and am currently going through "What the Dormouse Said" by John Markoff. A dream of mine has been to write a follow-up to Hackers someday. A book of the same style picking up where Hackers left off in the mid-1980s. It could cover NeXT, GNU/Linux, Netscape/Mosaic, Valve, Google, Facebook, up to modern hacking on the frontier of biology, education, and the rebirth of hardware hacking. I feel like every generation should have a volume similar to Hackers.

The last time I tried that the officer angrily barked back at me, "GIVE ME A NUMBER." So YMMV, I guess.

This is really helpful. I'm kind of thrown by the page about "final". The C++ example shows a method that is both virtual and final, which seem to be in contradiction of each other. Or am I missing something?

Effectively a lot of companies already do something approaching this, particularly larger ones that can afford to invest the time in an employee.

When I started at my current position I was pretty good at hacking away at whatever coding task they gave me, but as far as the intricacies of working with a cross functional team of dozens of developers and business people, balancing priorities, coordinating timelines, independently identifying needs, taking initiative, and so forth, I had to learn all that on the job.

To actually respond to your question, though, I think the need for apprentice-style programs is gradually becoming more apparent. The day to day of an average working developer is way different than you might expect from going through a university CS program. Really, on the job training is already happening, the cost is just being absorbed with the first n months of a junior developer starting a job, so it's currently hidden.

This is fantastic. My only suggestion would be a stronger visual indication of when something gets added to the sum or the score. It probably sounds cosmetic, but visual feedback is helpful for reinforcing text explanations (at least for me, being a more hands-on learner).