“So, where do you see yourself in 5 years?”

I’m willing to bet every person reading this has had that question posed to them at some point, most likely in a job interview, but possibly during an appraisal, or if you’re really unlucky, by a potential father-in-law at a dinner party. I’m going to call it out right now – it’s one of the stupidest questions you can be asked. It’s a test, of course – does this person have a plan? Are they committed to their career? Or, more accurately, can they make something plausible up on a whim, by accurately judging the kind of crap that I, the questioner, want to hear?

OK, so maybe there are some people out there who genuinely plan their career out 5 years in advance, but I also imagine they’re rather dull people to be around. I can’t recall for sure, but to my regret I think I may have asked this question myself in interviews many years ago, embedded as I was in an environment of conformity and convention which demanded certain inexplicable behaviours handed down from forefathers whose underlying reasoning (such as it was) was long forgotten. If I asked this question of a recruit now (and I wouldn’t, but if I did), I’d only be asking it as an ironic anti-question, since I now believe the only honest and vaguely correct answer is “How the hell should I know?”. At which point I’d probably give that person the job just for being honest and we’d figure out what to do next on the fly, which is what we’d have done anyway of course.

Because when it comes down to it, plans (of any kind) are one part fairy tale and one part straight-jacket. Not only are things not going to turn out the way you think now on any time scale beyond the life of your average housefly, leading to the very real expectation of self-abuse for not delivering on ‘The Plan’ (choral accompaniment), but by being fixated on past expectations you’re very likely to be less adaptable to change, and to pass up alternative opportunities that you didn’t expect. And that’s not a minor issue: the best opportunities I’ve ever had have always been unexpected, and my primary successes have been universally unplanned. Looking back, choosing and setting a direction in life at any point in time was important, but planning specific goals was not, because all the best stuff just kind of happened along the way.

So, if you do interviews, please stop asking this question, it’s meaningless. Everyone has a current direction, but let’s not kid ourselves about the immutability of that vector, or that the destination is knowable. If it was, life would be pretty boring anyway, right?

I’m glad to say it’s good news. In the 6 months since I announced my retirement, my back has improved a huge amount. Withdrawing from my multitude of (over)commitments was hard, and I felt guilty for quite a while (as well as reducing my income since I switched to less stressful projects of my own), but it was absolutely the right decision. Literally every month that passed has made a small difference, and it has thankfully accumulated – right now it’s better than it’s ever been. I’m not in pain on a daily basis any more (only occasionally if I overdo something), and I feel a lot more confident that I’m not going to injure myself doing normal everyday things. You’ve no idea how much it means to me to be able to go to bed at night without dreading how much it’s going to hurt to get out of bed the next day – such a simple thing, but it’s a huge deal to me after 2 years of pain.

My physio’s theory (after being very puzzled because the problems I had were symptomatic of a major trauma, of which there was no evidence) was that the problem was a vicious circle of stress and excessive time being desk-bound that had caused a long-term shortening of the tendons / muscles in my back, coupled with a general age-related degradation of discs, which then (because of the pain) caused me injure the nerves far too easily, causing more stress and making exercise to alleviate the problem long-term very difficult to do. In hindsight, while I was skeptical for a long time it appears he was right – it’s just that to break that cycle required a massive change in lifestyle over a sustained period of time, and being consistent with that change even when it didn’t seem to be working early on.

I’ve always believed that success is just a factor of effort and consistency, and that there’s no such thing as a ‘quick fix’ for anything important. I think if there’s any experience in my life that has reinforced this philosophy (and also tested my ability to follow it), it’s this. Plenty of people (particularly in the USA) told me I should be looking for a surgical solution. I never wanted that – the spine is a ridiculously complicated structure and I had very little faith that such a fix would last (even if it worked short-term), particularly while the original cause of the problem wasn’t explained. I’m glad that the culture here is to operate only if there is no chance of natural rehabilitation, because even if there had there been a viable ‘quick fix’, without the lifestyle change I’m sure the problem would just have reappeared later anyway.

It also seems that there was a combination of physical and psychological factors contributing to this, which again undermines the surgical option. I’ve historically had quite a high tolerance for stress and work-related pressure – in fact I’ve done some of my best work in the crucible of ridiculous deadlines and seemingly intractable problems. My general attitude that I could ‘push through’ any difficulties, reinforced by the inevitable high in the aftermath, pretty much set me up for this kind of problem – because when my health started to falter, I took the same attitude. Obviously, it doesn’t work. Stress and frustration cause tense muscles, which exacerbate the problems of discs compressed by too much inactivity and make stretching them out to their proper state again even more difficult. So in addition to changing my work habits, I’ve had to learn how to relax again. It sounds ridiculous, but because of stress and a reaction to pain (which is to tense up), I had literally forgotten how to relax a certain bunch of muscles in my lower / mid back. I had to be taught how to do it again using breathing exercises and gradual, millimetre-by-millimetre changes in posture over time (too much at once would cause me lots of pain).

So, it’s been a long road and it’s not finished yet – nor will it ever really be finished, since I’ll need to continue with my new lifestyle for the foreseeable future. I have a newfound appreciation for keeping my stress levels lower and being more realistic about what I put my body through in the pursuit of work / hobbies. In many ways the old Steve is gone (the workaholic, coding at 3am Steve who created Ogre). The new Steve has a working back though, and frankly, that’s far more valuable.

I literally had no idea this was going on, or that my cousin had been asked to make the delivery that day (I thought we were just meeting for a social). I was completely taken aback and very touched that the people in the community would go to the trouble of doing something like this for me. There’s a thread in the forums going into more detail on how they organised it, including the many, many different designs they mocked up and considered before voting for this one. I’m humbled and flattered.

My sincere thanks to everyone who was involved in organising this, and very well done for creating such an excellent statue and managing so successfully to keep me in the dark about it! You guys are just awesome.

Over the years I’ve learned a couple of things about choosing what projects to work on – follow your gut, and work on things you’d do even if there was no money in it. Yes, you need to do a business case and convince yourself that there’s a viable market for what you have in mind, but all that’s irrelevant if you don’t feel strongly about what you’re doing, because it’s passion and enthusiasm that will get you through the difficult times. So I sat down and gave some thought to what really excited me these days, what I liked using and what technical directions piqued my interest. I still find 3D and games fascinating, but they’re far from my only interests.

So, I realised that one area that I’ve been dying to get my teeth into properly for ages but had never found the time before, was coding specifically for Mac OS X. In 3 years I’ve gone from a total newcomer to the platform, to a staunch advocate of it. However until now I’d never really had time to play with developing on it, beyond porting cross-platform C++ code and providing / using intermediate libraries. One thing I learned in those 3 years as a user was how much better applications designed for OS X felt to use compared to those that were just ported via a common UI layer (like wxWidgets / Qt), and I’m convinced now that while cross-platform infrastructural code is great, user experiences are far better when designed with the specific platform in mind – increasingly that means OS and physical device now of course. Sure, cross-platform UIs save the developer time, but the result is often a watered-down experience – early on I liked OS X applications that felt like Windows, or ran the same on both platforms – now I  do not. Such carbon-copying applications were helpful while I was unfamiliar with the platform, but now it’s just glaring to me how basic their compatibility with the OS typically is, and how the UI styles clash with the expected standards.

So, I decided I wanted to learn how to target OS X specifically, and had a couple of ideas for projects I could do with it, which meant learning Objective-C. At first, I hated it and tried to escape via more familiar technologies like Objective-C++ and PyObjC. Ultimately I found shortcomings and limitations of those routes and returned to Objective-C, and the more I used it, the more my animosity toward it diminished. In the end I realised the problem was that I needed to adapt to the environment, rather than try to adapt it to my previously learned styles and behaviours. Sure, missing elements like namespaces might still nag me, but on balance the blend of static and dynamic language elements works very well for the intended use. And besides, I really didn’t want to be ‘that guy’ – the programmer that having decided one language / tech is ‘the best’, then tries to apply it everywhere, regardless of suitability; I like to think I’m a bit more flexible & multicultural than that.

I’ve also learned that Cocoa is a very, very smart system. Mad as a bison if you’re used to other systems beforehand, but persevere with it and resist the urge to hide it under some vanilla layer that you’re already familiar with, and you discover it’s really very powerful. Not to mention the Core Animation and Core Graphics frameworks are a lot of fun.

It’s funny, I’ve spent so many years concerning myself with providing compatibility across multiple OS’s, multiple GPUs, multiple render APIs, and multiple drivers, it’s a genuine joy to actually forget all that for a while, and concentrate on an end goal with a finite number of permutations for a change – and not to shy away from using platform-specific features.

While I’m still very much an advocate of open systems, I look at things slightly differently now – that data & protocols should be open, and that we should all re-use & collaborate on common, preferably open source infrastructure (like OGRE), but that the ‘last mile’ to the user is the least suitable for generalisation, because the more specific you can make that interface to what the user expects on their OS & device, the better that experience will be. And at the end of the day to the user, that experience is the application, and thus all that really matters – and I feel that Apple gets that, in a way that very few others do.

So, I’m having a great time learning to be an Apple developer so far, I’m going to see where this takes me for a while. My gut says it feels right, and I’ve learned to listen to my gut I love the platform, it’s a total change of pace and technology, it’s something I’ve had an interest in for a while, and the Mac has quite a thriving community of quality independent app developers that I can try to join – what’s not to like?

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

Having picked up a number of games for Christmas I’ve had something of a boost recently, but last night while playing Assassin’s Creed II (which is a vast improvement on the original which had great atmosphere and free running mechanics but was riddled with tedious repetition and hence I never finished it) I completely accidentally landed on precisely 10,000 gamer points at the end of the night:

How can I possibly play anything else now? I’ll never, ever have a score that perfect again!

I’m not sure why my gamercard is currently in German (‘Bereich’), thanks dodgy XBL site localisation.

So anyway, 2010 is here. I’ll be keeping an eye out for black obelisks, but since we didn’t come up with an equivalent of Hal by 2001 I’m beginning to suspect the books weren’t that prophetic a vision of the future after all. It’s a new decade that we have to find yet another awkward moniker for – the ‘noughties’ was pretty rubbish but the ‘tens’ isn’t much better. Frankly, I couldn’t much care for the significance of entering another decade – after all, it’s all arbitrarily counted anyway, and after you’ve seen the passing of a new millennium (in all its vastly anticlimactic glory) it’s hard to get excited about any piddling small numbers any more.

I can’t say I mourn the passing of 2009, which despite a few high points (returning to Canada on holiday, seeing the viral success of Torchlight, getting 1.7 out the door, and so on) wasn’t an ideal year for me. Better than the end of 2008, when my back injury was at its worst, but due to the economic climate and needing to recover my health, I’ve been juggling lots of smaller jobs in 2009, and as such have not felt a great deal of attachment to most of the projects I’ve worked on. I’ve also had to consciously hold myself back from over-committing for fear of putting my recovery in jeopardy. By nature I’m an ‘all or nothing’ kind of character, so I’ve found this deeply unsatisfying at times. It’s kept the financials ticking over, but it also comes with lots more admin overhead (= wasted time) and doesn’t motivate me as much. I intend to change that in 2010 – I can’t go back to the kind of hours I was doing in 2008 and before, but I intend to try to fill the hours I have with things I can feel more personally committed to. OGRE is one of those things of course.

In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy and prosperous 2010!

I was 10/11 years old when this magazine came out, and I can probably trace my programming beginnings directly to it. It’s probably a bizarre concept to the younger generation, now that they have instant access to almost limitless information on the Internet. What I would have given to have the Internet back then when I was learning, instead of scratching around for information in magazines like this.

For those who, like me, haven’t encountered these before, some shops in the last couple of years have been adding red theft-prevention strips to some DVD cases. These strips, as shown here, run through slots in the DVD case and not only hold it firmly closed, and include a security RFID thingamabob to set off the alarms at the door, but they press against the underside of the clips that hold the disc in so they cannot be released- so even if you manage to pry open the case, you can’t (easily) get the DVD out.

One of my game gifts this season still had this tag attached, and given that I doubt my mother-in-law is a shoplifter, and the RFID tag hadn’t set off the doors, I assume that the shop staff had forgotten to remove it. It was completely new to me (all my other games have just had RFID tags taped to them), and was surprisingly difficult to defeat, which is the point I suppose. Marie suggested I took it back to the shop to get them to do it, but a) I’d have to get hold of the receipt to avoid being assumed to be a thief b) that’s way too much hassle, and c) this was a logistical challenge that simply had to be solved without outside assistance, in order to prove…something. It’s a male thing.

In the end various implements (knives, forks and pliers) were involved, but I managed it without destroying the disc or (surprisingly) even the case. But, there’s certainly no way you could do this in the shop without being completely obvious, so I guess this is a ‘good’ security system, if only the stupid employees would remember to do what they’re supposed to. I was going to post a series of images of this, but then I realised others have already posted videos of it which were similar to my technique anyway, so here’s one for the similarly afflicted:

Merry Christmas!

And in fact, it’s actually been very useful. I’ve almost stopped blogging about Ogre work unless there’s a significant event or something I feel needs greater analysis, because my Twitter feed is a better way to get the word out about things. It’s also been useful to get feedback on certain technical issues and to keep up to date with what other people are doing. Specifically, I tend to only follow people who post about things I’m interested in, rather than just because I know them.

And this tends to work well – I’ve found that Twitter users, or at least the ones I follow, in general tend to automatically filter their content to things that are actually interesting. This is in contrast to Facebook, which is so chock full of the utterly banal that I lose the will to live every time I try to catch up with the feed – there are usually some things in there I’d genuinely be interested in, but it’s so full of crap I can hardly face spending the time to find it. Much of that is due to its insistence that I’m somehow interested in the events of all the Facebook games people are playing, when in fact I couldn’t give a flying toss what new fish someone has just unlocked in some ridiculous mini-game. I’m close to just deleting my account and forgetting all about it – if you want to be social, grab a coffee / drink with me sometime or something – at least then you’re unlikely to keep interrupting to tell me what your level is in FarmVille.

Computer systems are tools, and can be used for good or ill. I’ve come across lots of people that use Twitter in a genuinely useful and non-intrusive way, and I try to do the same, and as such it’s made a firm place for itself in my day – something I would not have taken for granted when I started using it.