How I got interested in improving developer experience and software performance

Over the last 7 years, I've been asking myself how to develop new ideas faster while having more fun, so I've making lots of prototypes to change my development practices.

Slowly, pieces of the puzzle feel into place and I started to experiment with architecting software so I could jump to any state of the UI immediately. For example, I could simulate users interacting in different ways resulting in different combinations of things in their activity feeds, so I could reproduce see all edge cases and style them. Then, I realized I could run these simulations in parallel and give me a god-like overview of many different cases side-by-side, so I immediately see the impact of style changes across the product.

This lined up with what I was learning from other, more experienced programmers: awesome developer tooling doesn't only lead to faster iteration speed and better products, it also brings back a lot of joy to crafting your product.

Then, I discovered Handmade Hero, a series of videos describing how to make a video game engine from scratch. I learned that even in C, memory management is a lot simpler than what we've been told and you can hot-reload an entire game with minimal effort if you just set things up the right way. Also, I learned just how fast modern computers are and that with minimal care using a low-level language, you can make products that are easily 100x faster than lots of other products.

So my goal over the next year is to get better at systems programming using Data Oriented Design while prototyping different ideas and write about them. First up is a prototype I've written in Zig to visualize system architectures and learn about (YAML and Typescript) parsing, graph visualization and reasoning from first principles about software performance.

If any of this sounds interesting and you'd like to exchange ideas, feel free to reach out!