Otto Schnurr

iOS Software Engineer

Simplicity

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

Brian Kernighan

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word.

— Steven King

If you love writing code – really, truly love to write code – you’ll love it enough to write as little of it as possible.

Jeff Atwood

Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.

— Albert Einstein

“C” is for cookie. That’s good enough for me.

— Anonymous





A Programmer's Guide to Joining the Circus

There was a time in my life when I wanted to bring more right-brain thinking into my career. The division between technical and creative work always seemed somehow artificial and pervasive. Like some unexpected obstacle in the road. A Monty Python bridge of death where you are stopped and forced to choose. Creative or technical. Design or implementation.

Once you make the choice, you live with it. There’s no going back. Not without significant personal cost. No crossing the streams.

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Complexity

The Programmers’ Credo: We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy.

Maciej Cegłowski

The key to performance is elegance, not battalions of special cases.

Jon Bentley and Doug McIlroy

First you learn the value of abstraction. Then you learn the cost of abstraction. Then you’re ready to engineer.

Kent Beck




Persistence

The best writing is rewriting.

— E. B. White

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

— Thomas Edison

Play a game you can win. Lose as much as you need to, to get there.

— David Allen



Reliability

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilisation.

Gerald Weinberg

Thou shalt not follow the NULL pointer, for chaos and madness await thee at its end.

Henry Spencer

… In fact, never ever use gets() or sprintf(), period. If you do, we will send evil dwarfs after you.

— FreeBSD Secure Programming Guidelines

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

Edsger Dijkstra



Courage

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.

— Anais Nin









Short List 1.1

After methodically applying small handfuls of available time, the next update for Short List is finally ready. It addresses the #1 requested feature that I received - longer lists.

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From Animation to iPhone

Animation Work

After starting as a contractor in September 2007, DigitalFish took me on as a full time employee three months later. The contribution I’m most proud of is adding a pose mode to Reflex.

Reflex character animation

Working on the inside of a killer animation tool is a blast. The guys at DF aren’t afraid of throwing out a big lasso to wrangle in epic amounts of internal complexity so that animator side of the tool “just works” in amazing, intuitive ways. Accomplishing this with flexibility and real-time performance is not easy.

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Hello DigitalFish!

The next leg of my adventure is underway! I’ve accepted a contract position at DigitalFish. The expertise and focus they’re applying to character animation is incredible. Needless to say, I’m quite excited!

I’m on a mission to find the most inspirational and exciting 2d/3d animation software around. Currently the brilliant minds at DigitalFish are making my toes tingle with Reflex.

Jason Schleifer