GDC 2016

Posted on 2016/01/05 by Chad Philip

The kindly wonderful (or perhaps “wonderfully kind”) people at the IGDA Games Accessibility SIG asked me if I would be willing to help run the group’s annual activities at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this March. I couldn’t say no, and so now I get to play as a “speaker” at the 2016 conference.

It is required that all registered GDC speakers submit a few personal details, including a 150 word description of themselves so that conference attendees will have something to reference as they are searching for the next talk or meeting to drop in on. As anyone can tell from the ChadSpace website, I very much dislike writing about myself, so after 45 very long and excruciating minutes of feigned distress, I was finally able to settle on the following:

Presenter Name: Chad Philip Johnson
Presenter Email: ********@anacronist.com
Presenter Affiliation: Engineer, Anacronist Software

Presenter Bio:  Chad Philip Johnson is a Software Engineer and budding essayist at the Northern California-based company Anacronist Software.  He passes his time exploiting everyday technologies in exciting and unconventional ways, with the intent of engendering solutions to contemporary software development mispractices and conundrums.  He is a proponent of the Java and Scala programming languages and technologies--which are frequently dissociated from game development processes--and anything else promoting cross-platform ideals.  Fortunately, Chad also likes video games a great deal and so his interests dovetail quite naturally into his current responsibilities at work which are to 01) lead the design and implementation of a new style of tools and technologies for game developers with small- to medium-sized teams, 02) partner with companies to resurrect prematurely abandoned game ideas from the past, and 03) be a ray of sunshine in a world that plays too much Candy Crush Saga and World of Warcraft.

As usual, I went for the “more is more” approach, using all 150 words that were allotted to me. I suppose I may alter a few things

, but right now the write-up seems to be as appropriate and ridiculous as just about anything else I could have come up with.

Antiphony, Entry 1: Free Lottery Tickets

Posted on 2015/12/30 by Chad Philip

I’m not sure if this still works here since I am using ChadPress instead of Facebook, but I guess it can’t hurt to try. Also, I have included some of my responses in the event that it increases my chances of winning.

THANK YOU, MARK ZUCKERBERG [who?], for your forward-thinking generosity! [What did he do?] And congrats on becoming a dad! [Huh?!]

Mark Zuckerberg [oh right... the Grand Poobah of privacy and productivity erosion] has announced that he is giving away $45 billion [with a "B"?] of Facebook stock. [Hhmmmm... sounds a little fishy to me.] What you may not have heard [no I haven't, must you go on?] is that he plans to give 10% of it away to people like YOU and ME! [Really..? What a dumbass!] All you have to do is copy and paste this message into a post IMMEDIATELY and tag 5-10 of your friends. [Or irritated acquaintances that don't really like you.] At midnight PST, Facebook will search through the day’s posts and award 1000 people with $4.5 million EACH [that's really a lot of money] as a way of saying thank you for making Facebook such a powerful vehicle for connection and philanthropy [and watered down relationships].

I hope someone I know gets a piece of the pie [blueberry or apple?] — let me know if you do!!! [Yeah right, asshole!]

In case you’re wondering what this is about, you can read about it at The Washington Post and many other fine news agencies (that apparently have nothing better to report).

Phobos Moon, Dying Star

Posted on 2015/12/28 by Chad Philip

Phobos (track 04 from the Phobos LP by Voivod )
→ “Phobos” Song Lyrics

The Tower (track 07 from the Phobos LP)
→ “The Tower” Song Lyrics
Quantum (track 08 from the Phobos LP)
→ “Quantum” Song Lyrics

8,760,000 Work Hours

Posted on 2015/12/27 by Chad Philip

According to a statement in the book The Well-Grounded Java Developer , the Java Virtual Machine—which is that incredibly nifty piece of software that allows applications written in the Java programming language and others to run on many different types of operating systems, such as Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, etc.—represents approximately “1,000 person-years of effort”. The book was published in mid-2012, which was more than three years ago now, so that number would already be significantly higher.

Let’s do some simple arithmetic:

y = ( number of years )
d = ( number of days per year )
h = ( number of hours per day )
t = ( total number of hours )

t = y * d * h

y = 10 yr
d = 365 day/yr
h = 24 hr/day

t = ( 10 yr ) * ( 365 day/yr ) * ( 24 hr/day )

t = 8,760,000 hr

Assuming that a standard year’s worth of work is comprised of 2,000 hours of labor—and I feel obliged to point out that this is a number at which some people would scoff—it would take one person 4,380 years to match the amount of time that was committed to this technology back when those words were put into print.

On a somewhat related note, I find it interesting that the authors chose the term “person-years”, as if the fellows on the Java team are something other than human. Perhaps I’m reading into this too much, but it may suggest that the Java Virtual Machine was made by aliens… or dogs… or maybe very intelligent hamsters?

ChadSpace

Chad Philip Johnson's Website

GDC 2016

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