A Master Programmer
Recently Lex Fridman posted a podcast episode of his discussion with John Carmack (Duration 5hr+). Carmack is a legendary programmer. Known for his work on games like Doom, Quake, and Oculus VR.
If you have 5 hrs worth spending on something interesting irrespective of whether it adds immediate value, it is worth watching. Carmack knows so much about so many topics and he is never boring. Not in this chat nor in other talks. In fact, the well known podcast host seems to fall short here in this discussion.
Quite a few topics get discussed here. If you like this, then the book Masters Of Doom is a very highly recommended reading. The book talks about how the masters of doom got into gaming, programming, started their own company, fell apart, why violence and gore were central to their games and game changing (no pun intended.), dungeon masters, cult following, Carmack’s legends like coke, pizza, inverse square root approximation technique, Ferrari, other interests, etc. The podcast episode adds a few topics like VR, AGI, nuclear energy, self driving cars to the topics from the book. His ideas like the one to draw an extra strip of tile outside the right edge of the screen beforehand and keep it in memory ready for player movement on the right and why it was revolutionary, or the one about not re-drawing all the pixels, etc. are discussed in both (book and video) in good detail. In the video, there are some no-nonsense answers which make it much better in my opinion: whether AI is going in the right ethical direction, etc. Carmack answers these with some sense. For example, there is no big-company political correctness, neither there is sensational NGO madness about say self driving cars. He just mentions that at a point we will have enough data and we would be able to make self driving vehicles safer such that authorities will end up allowing/ pushing for these.
On the other hand while his passion for books (comics, fiction, non fiction) is highlighted in the episode, I think it comes across more strongly in the book. How he went into isolation and read all the books he could get about a topic if he wanted learn more about that or wanted ideas about how to solve a particular problem came across more prominently in the book (this was referred to as his larvae period in the podcast).
The book also talks about changing gaming industry, the impact these people had, shareware, and also tells a few cautionary tales about startups/ companies along the way.
Overall, the book is quite uplifting if not inspiring.
Another couple of books in the area of programmer biography/ history I would recommend are: Seibel’s Coders at Work, and Lammers’ Programmers at Work (Disclaimer: if I remember correctly, I have not read all interviews from Programmers at Work, but how could you not read an interview with BillG?)