Why You Should Learn To Program the HARD WAY

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[williamlvea]

When you reinvent the wheel, you learn not only how to make wheels, but also get a deeper understanding of why we have wheels

[qrjftvx]

i like how prime thinks regardless if its big or small or fail or succeed learning is never time wasted

[NickDirtyDolce]

Writing my own engine opened countless doors for me. If you learn the fundamentals you’ll inevitably become the person that can do everything.

[danidotexe_]

i was part of a gamedev startup as one of their core programmers until we failed after a few years. i built out so much tech and learned so much, that i turned it into a senior position with ease afterwards

[SmoothCode]

"Wasting time" is part of the learning process. Foundation is incredibly important.

[JonathanTheZombie]

10:53 as a senior engineer, the only way to impress us is to have the ability to solve new problems. Memorizing one framework is great, but can you pivot that knowledge into something brand new, or solve a novel problem? That’s what companies need, not the chatgpt solutions

[tenminuteamateurhour]

I was once ridiculed for never finishing the game I worked on, completely ignoring the fact it took me from being a customer support drone to a highly sought-after engineer. I just smiled and laughed. Felt good.

[TRex-fubt]

One of the hardest classes I took was a speech anatomy class. The instructor never told us the specific actions or functions of muscles but instead had us study the anatomy diagrams and describe what’s connected where and what a contraction would do. I could have easily found some flash cards or whatever but that intense discovery-based way of learning means that I will probably never forget any of it or that I can use reasoning to figure out anything I might forget. Big fan of learning the hard way when I have the enthusiasm for it.

[jlr]

I can support what you’re saying in this video, but with the emphasis that you need to accept learning as a valuable outcome. Before I got a job as a game developer, I spent a year building my own engine. It skyrocketed not only my c++ ability, but also my understanding of low level graphics apis and different engine architectures, animation systems, etc. By the end of that year, I got a job at one of the most prestigious studios in the industry. A year after that, I was promoted to senior. Eventually, I looked for jobs elsewhere. They offered me a $50k raise trying to get me to stay.

If you have a low level understanding of how things work in your field and the ability/drive to tackle those problems, you are incredibly valuable.

However, I never finished that engine, and I ended up dealing with a difficult bout of depression. I’d configured my expectations incorrectly. Just a word of caution, set your expectations correctly.

[CR]

10:40 That sounds exactly like my last job interview. I had built a large-scale game and learned so much beyond my formal degree level. Though I never "finished" it, I found a company that was willing to interview me on the merits of that game. I'm still with the company 12 years later.

[cipherpunk]

I am a professional game developer who chose to learn programming the hard way. I always believed that I learn more by building things myself. If I had chosen to start with a game engine, I would be great at X engine but I'd much rather have skills that enable to work in any engine I want. It took me nearly 10 years to land my first job in the industry and some people might argue that I could have moved faster but I still believe I made the best choice for my career.

My coworkers were very surprised to learn that I was a self-taught programmer because I don't approach problems from a high level mindset. Many of the challenges I face at work, I'm able to overcome by working from first principles. My bosses took notice when they could throw random work at me and I would make it happen, regardless of the specific knowledge domain.

Everything @ThePrimeTime says about the rewards for deep learning in this video is correct.

[tedbendixson]

Love that you looked at this :-) Also lovely that I'm watching this just after coming off of anesthesia from an echocardiogram.

[datazard]

I think that one thing that is missed is that you get incredibly good at understanding when the tools you use just break, and you can adequately fix that in your own way. The truth is that all those tools are not foolproof, there will always be assumptions that break and bugs.

I have found myself repairing library code or entirely rewriting parts of libraries because they just don't work for our use case. (I am currently working with Python, but have experience in Frontend, and low level code, ).

Doing it from the ground up forces you to think about things that a normal dev will not ever think about unless he is very experienced in the tool he is using.

You get a general kind of knowledge that is very hard to get otherwise.

[_Aarius_]

building low level stuff manually has taught me more than playing lego with libraries and engines has. Most of the time the stuff i make at home never gets finished because it was never the point, but sometimes a project I finish IS the point. A mix of the two - build-it-yourself and finish something with normal tools - is what worked for me

[rockybangalore]

It's so hard to explain to people, why they have to learn things the hard way.
Building basic things the hard way is particularly useful if you want to build a career out of it. You gain expertise which you wouldn't get following tutorials.
Making mistakes is good for knowledge. Having the ability to resolve issues is what makes you a productive and fast developer. It sets you apart from others.
Skills that you gain debugging issues translate to so many advantages in many other fields and technology. You become the guy who gets stuff done.
It's worth it.

[Kevinjimtheone]

In the university I went to, we started with C with the first lecture being selection statements, functions, and loops, and the second memory management…

In the first semester we had to build a 16bit microprocessors by hand on a breadboard, too.

Later on, we had to write our own drivers, our own virtual microprocessor, our own neural network, and write our own compile, etc.

We were never allowed to use anything that we didn’t write ourselves. We even had to make our own game engine when we made a game.

It was hell, most often than not, but you learned a lot.

[henryvaneyk]

This is one reason that I am so glad I started working in IT in the early days. I had no choice but to use C, Pascal, ASM and later C++ to do coding, with no frameworks available. It thought me so much about how the computer hardware, firmware and the OS worked together. And I also had to dig deep into how low level protocols and device drivers worked.

[alexaneals]

I will say one of the proudest program projects that I have completed was a hobby project that I created in Assembly. It was just a simple text editor and I have built far more complex applications since using other languages, but the month or so that I spent making the DOS text editor in Assembly allowed me to learn the CPU and I/O buses on a 386.

[nexovec]

Am I really the only person that looks at programming and my brain instantly goes to "I WANT TO LEARN ALL THIS CRAZY $#!T?"

[zoeherriot]

I hire game developers in the games industry. This guys advice is pretty good - but I'd say it's not a hard and fast rule. If you're ONLY goal is to release a game (and particularly if this is your first game) - don't start by writing an engine - you will be disappointed.If you go in knowing the additional risk - then yeah, go for it. But the problem with writing an engine before having written a game is that you don't necessarily know what a game engine requires.

Here's the thing though - we do need people that re-invent the wheel to simply learn. If you want a high probability of getting a job in the games industry, having those skills is pretty beneficial. The harder it is to acquire the skills you have, the less competition you will face.