Comments on: Designing And Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game

By: Graphics & Designing - Smart Onliners Official Blog

Graphics & Designing - Smart Onliners Official Blog — Mon, 31 Aug 2015 18:03:58 +0000

[…] Designing And Building Stockfighter, Our Programming Game http://www.kalzumeus.com/(“Fantasy” is, in this sense, a term of art from game development: much like someone writing a novel or screenplay, a game designer wants to have intentional control over the player's emotional state. If you'd like to read more … […]

By: Randall

Randall — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 23:36:41 +0000

(Amending the first thing I said: maybe it’s less that product companies rarely blog about design, what users want, and such pragmatic things, and more that the tweeps I follow and sites I scan (HN, cough cough) tend to highlight low-level or CS-y stuff. That, at least, is a very fixable problem. :) )

By: Randall

Randall — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 23:33:29 +0000

I will say it’s _really_ nice to read about the design stuff, level progression, etc, from the same folks who are writing the code. Seems more common in the Ruby/Python/… communities where a lot of folks are doing consulting jobs and focused on client needs, as opposed to big product companies where they have to spend a lot of time worrying about challenges of scale and also (at least when they’re blogging, etc.) focus on what other techies think is cool. :)

I would like Go to be way better for quickly standing up a reasonable, basic Web app. I play w/Go for fun and use Python at work. Now that work is 6y into a now-huge Django app I get why Gophers don’t want to just reinvent Django wholesale. But it also seems wrong that you can’t get halfway-competitive time-to-market building simple CRUD stuff with Go. I haven’t yet really tried building something app-y with Go yet; would like to dig more into what go-kit and Google App Engine do.

Finally, those t2 instances seem like an underrated deal for some things–I played on a t2.medium (I think) for a fun project, and my single-threaded benchmarks were better than what I later saw on a c4.large. May have been luck of who I shared a box with, but the trend kept up across a bunch of t2 restarts. I half suspect the physical boxes hosting t2s tend have low CPU use, so you get the CPU’s “turbo” speeds more often, as long as you don’t use enough to run out of credits and get throttled.

By: Francis Kim

Francis Kim — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 12:49:07 +0000

Sounds like awesomely exciting stuff! I’ll be looking out for this one.

By: Aditya Menon

Aditya Menon — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 13:50:53 +0000

I can almost see you practically bursting at the seams with pride for all the challenges solved and excitement to see this live: really cool read, and look forward to getting my behind kicked in the game!!

By: Nitin

Nitin — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 12:20:15 +0000

Also recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction-strategies/dp/0956399207

By: Pippa

Pippa — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 10:56:34 +0000

I’m looking forward to this as a programmer who dislikes traditional gaming. The fact that it’s a stock market puts me off, but then the way you have described it I think I can get behind the idea. Particularly if it encourages learning through doing — and hopefully there will be enough diversity that this really does help produce/find people with great industry skills.

“We log everything under the sun” — I assume that you will be using this mechanism o create some form of reporting? It would be great to just click a button and generate a one pager which could then be passed on to a recruiter which would explain exactly why I am actually a good programmer even though I have limited industry experience or formal education etc etc.

“I log into our staging environment (Amazon’s Oregon data center) from Tokyo and I can’t tell it’s not on localhost… except when the speed of light decides to play tricks on me.” — Sounds like you have a very good internet connection. But my first thought on reading that statement was actually “He does know there is a data center in Tokyo right?” Are you planning on having the servers distributed globally to improve performance, or are you going to force everyone to talk to Oregon because that’s where Wall Street is (kind of)? I can see benefits in both. Of course the speed of light is only your biggest issue if you’re running a fibre connection. If you’re running on plain old copper, or over wifi, things are going to slow down even more.

By: Beatrix Willius

Beatrix Willius — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 05:46:42 +0000

As a non-gamer I probably would run away screaming if I ever do an interview again and encounter someone who wants me to play a game instead.

I’m sorry but I don’t see how this would improve hiring. What is the benefit?

By: SeekingOmnicron

SeekingOmnicron — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 22:02:25 +0000

*If I had cottoned onto the wisdom of the common Go pattern “Make a server object with one managing go-routine and have it tightly loop on a single channel of incoming requests” earlier, I probably would have a avoided a whole lot of deadlocks, crashes, and concurrency bugs*

Everyone has their moment of Zen with Golang concurrency…

Is there a community forum for discussing strategies or should we subreddit?