Versus Software

This post will not be a technical post. I won’t make analysis of software engineering, nor any optimization tricks. This post is about a song that changed my life. More specifically Milton Nascimento’s “Bailes da Vida”

So you can understand why this song had such a huge impact with me let’s go back in time a bit to 2005…

I was a freshman at college, and as I explained in a previous post, I was obsessed with the concept of creating a portfolio. I knew that I had to use my college years in order to produce a portfolio strong enough to aid me getting a job in the gaming industry. I had to use those 4 years wisely.

It felt like a countdown had begun on my first day at college and that I had to keep pace before time ran out. It in itself was a fun sensation, I felt like I had a constant challenge to beat.

It was also a tough sensation to live with throughout those years.

I still recall working on my projects till dawn and looking at myself alone in my dorm room. Many a times I felt like a fool, attempting to prove nothing to no one. To make matters worse I was going pretty badly in my first year of college, receiving lack luster grades on my first tests.

Coding large projects was something I was still getting a grasp off. Getting anything done or productive just took forever. Those late night bugs with Solis made me question if my time spent in fixing them was really worth it. I questioned if projects, or any other method, would really aid me in getting my dream job. Honestly, it was really tough feeling alone and without a proper direction on where to go.

All of that changed one late night though.

It was a Saturday, close to end of my first college year, and I had several bugs in the Solis Editor. It was close to 1 in the morning and the editor would just not work. I was dead tired. I had spent most of the week trying to fix those issues, but didn’t manage to make any significant progress at all. I thought to myself if I should go to bed and attempt fixing those bugs at a later time or if I should keep at it until it worked.

Oddly enough I had a very strange sensation dawning on me. As if that choice had become monumentally important, larger than what it really was. I didn’t know why but it felt like that. Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t just deciding to keep working on my project for that day. I was deciding if I was going to keep working on my project as a whole, and with that, attempt to get a job in the gaming industry.

I was deciding if I should continue to pursue my dream or not.

I almost did go to bed. But then a song played in the radio: Bailes da vida. And boy did that song hit me like a thunderstorm. If felt like a shockwave that petrified every cell in my body. The lyrics are:

Não importando se quem pagou quiz ouvir
Com a roupa enxarcada e a alma replete de chão
Todo artista tende a ir aonde o povo está
Se foi assim, assim sera
Cantando me disfarço e não me canço de viver
Nem de cantar

Not caring if those who paid wished to listen
With soaking clothes and a worn out soul
All artists tend to go where people are
If it’s like so, then let it be
While Singing I disguise myself, and won’t get tired of life
Nor of singing

What Milton talks in this song is not the act of singing in itself. It’s about the artistic desire of self-realization. An artist’s desire to sing sprouts from within for himself. It doesn’t matter if no one will listen; he sings for himself. He sings because he enjoys it in itself. He sings because he cannot imagine himself in a form or a way without music.

It’s weird but those lyrics finally made me understand why I was doing those projects. I wasn’t doing them because I wanted to prove something, nor because I just wanted to build a portfolio. I wasn’t just attempting to get a dream job.

I was doing these projects because they are part of who I am. I am a game developer. It’s not a job, it is who I am.

With that song, everything finally clicked. It all made sense. I kept working in the Solis Editor, and had a working build at 4 am.

And after Solis came Conira.

And after Conira came World Train Royale.

And after that my current job at Microsoft where I work with the game development aspects for the Windows Phone. But I’m not done there! There are many other projects and things to do! Because, like Milton said, it’s not just the goal:

É buscar o caminho que vai dar ao Sol

It’s searching for the path that leads us to the Sun

It’s a path that never ends, and honestly, I wouldn’t want it to end either.

In my last year of high school I had your typical Brazilian literature teacher, where he used to praise Brazilian authors in contrast with foreigner ones. He used to denounce reading foreigner authors and that the Brazilian mass should enjoy more of its local authors.

I pretty much disagreed with most of the things he said, but he did say one thing that struck me as true and it’s pretty much the only thing I took with me from his classes. He said:

An artist writes how he feels and how he feels is a direct consequence of the environment he finds himself at.

In other words an artist’s background, culture and the society around him influence his artistic views. Makes pretty much sense doesn’t it? But people usually apply this to writers and the normal standard of an artist. The catch is that it affects all creative thinkers, this includes engineers and software developers as well. Here’s an example.

Every now and then I read some article comparing the PlayStation 3 architecture with that of the Xbox360. Makes sense since they were both platforms developed to handle massive amounts of data. Usually those comparisons involve a instruction/triangle/frame/shading per second/pass view or how the 6 synchronous SPU cores compare with 3 asynchronous cores.

It’s all quite interesting, since for on one hand you have an architecture that’s basically massive raw power, running at the highest possible clock speed, with tons of ram. Big and bulky American muscle. On the other side you have a series of smaller cores, that require a more ellaborate design, streched throughout each individual node. Less but more refined, efficiency through group effort. When I see these sorts of things I think of only one thing: Motorcycles.

You have the classic American choppers, big bulky American muscle. Lots of fuel, big engine cylinders, raw power per torque. Made to last.

And then you have the Kawasaki’s lines. Less fuel per cycle, more refined in it’s architecture. Made to run fast.

Each of those types of Motorcycles present its ups and downs. With one you can go from coast to coast and back again. The other you can only go from one to state to the other but at top speed. They’re the same type of vehicle but the catch is that they were designed by engineers of different nationalities.

I’m not trying to throw the cliche dilemma of East vs. West here because I see it more as a general social example. Both engineering teams were given the same task: built me a motorcycle, but their final product is obviously different in terms of style and scope. To me a big part of it is that both teams had different cultural backgrounds, were in different societies and had thus different views on how to solve the same problem.

I think the same happened with the Xbox 360 and ps3 teams. Both had the same task: build me a video game, and the final product is obviously different.

Both systems have it’s ups and downs but the point I’m trying to make is that I think an ideal developer/engineer would be able to go beyond his cultural heritage and be able to reach the same conclusions the other team had, and in the end make the best overall decisions.

Generally I think a good artist is not bound by the limitations he found himself at. He is able to roam freely from it and create an art that doesn’t speak to only those individuals in his current social realm, but to all individuals. To me a good artist is universal in his approach of seeing and making art. As James Joyce put it brilliantly:

When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets

I think it’s a beautiful quote and strikes at the core of that which I spend so much time thinking about. Joyce is a relly good read, though unfortunally I don’t think my Literature teacher would read him.

At least you understand now why I disagreed with him so much.

Ever since I read this book a long time ago, I’ve always enjoyed art history and it’s analysis. I like how art, specially painting and drawing is a form of craftsmanship, how one evolves with it in time. I do enjoy looking at great contemporary artist like

Anry Nemo

Daniel Lieske

As well as old wizards like Dali

and Caravaggio

One thing I find particular interesting is how clearly explicit is a GOOD artist from a good one. Sure we can go down the path of Picasso being top notch and a genius while not being the best painter in the world, but my focus right now is in skill.

You can see, an artist is good when he masters several techniques like body proportions, shading, lighting,  diffusion, blur, meaning, semantics, and so on. To me all the artist above mastered this and it’s clearly visible even to laymen their genius.

That’s a thing a I refer to as the difference between masons and sculptors. Both work with the same raw materials, sometimes even the same tools, but their product is what separates the Pieta from simply another wall.

A sculptor understands the material he works to a point of such mastery that there is no limitation to what he can construct, all he needs is just time and resources. A mason while he may be good at it and could even attempt such a feat, in the end he would never reach such level.

There is clearly a distinction between the two, but what causes it? This change, that makes a beginner that is once a mason become a sculptor? What is the road to mastery?

I ask myself this question because I often draw parallels in between art and software development. Because I could just as well ask the same questions:

What defines a master developer? How does one become a genius in software construction? What is the road to mastery?

It’s easy to discern a great artist from an average one, all we have to do is look at their work, but how could we do this with developers? I usually read this in forums or talk with colleges and it usually revolves around with –

A great developer:

• Knows many languages
• Knows difficult languages
• Develops a lot
• Develops for fun
• Knows a lot about development
• Read a bunch of books
• Wrote a bunch of articles or even books
• Develops big products
• Never/rarely has bugs

And so on and so forth. Personally I think these criteria are fine but in the end, with them, you can’t discern a good mason from a sculptor. Knowing many languages doesn’t mean mastery of software construction, developing big products can be bottled down to trivial tasks such as mundane functions, lack of bugs can be either due to an easy to work environment or lack of new challenges.

My point is you can counter each one of those statements, thus failing to reach anywhere when trying to label an individual as a mason or a sculptor. What I believe is the way to go is something more along the lines of:

• A mason, given time, is able to solve most if not all known problems.
• An individual that is in between the two finds problems that haven’t been asked before.
• A sculptor is able to answer them.

I say this mainly because of my reference of what I consider to be great sculptors and their history, guys like Carmack, Abrash, Sweeney, Bram Cohen and so on. These guys managed to find problems no one faced before, or if they did no one answered, and then managed to find a solution of their own.

They did this because they knew their developing languages, their work environment, the machine down to the bitwise, to the electrical signal, to its deepest mathematical roots.

That to me is mastery. These are great artists. These are software sculptors.