I'm glad you said this actually, because I had a section in the "why" video where I tried to compare this project to how I've felt having kids and cut it out because it was too cheesy. maybe I'll bring it back!
I didn't ask them outright, but I sorta think the TypeScript team might agree with you on this point! haha. At least we can all agree it's not an intended use-case, to play Doom.
strong agree! so much of it boils down to "do you treat people good and stuff". then there's "do you treat yourself good and stuff", and then a tiny little fraction that's "can you work hard to get to an answer" and finally, least of all, "what do you know"
As luck would have it I happen to be the happiest at my current job than I've ever been ever (and by a lot) buttttttt if it's interesting to you one of the express goals of SquiggleConf is to get WebAssembly to be a "oh I know how to use it" tool in the everyday dev's mind. So I'll definitely ping you some time soon to see what you think (and I hope you can tell I'm not sponsor shopping! even if you have people building wasm tools web devs should know about and you can point them towards our CFP that would be huge! we really want great wasm coverage to widen the playing field for everyone).
Also -> actually Wasmer does have a small part in this whole story with Doom, too, which is sorta neat (will come up in the next few videos!).
love this feedback - will definitely talk about it in the next videos.
you're gonna laugh.. but the answer is "ignorance". I had no idea what I was doing and had literally never touched WebAssembly before but thought it'd be a good place to start. Then it just stuck.
Hilariously, later a friend explained to me "Dimitri, this would have been a LOT easier if you had just targeted ASSEMBLY. IT WAS RIGHT THERE IN THE NAME". haha. oh well! ignorance is bliss
Ah nice! Well, hats off this is really impressive. As other commenters mentioned the extent to which it's documented and the restricted scope probably helped.
(author here) that was one of the 1st-week "ok, but THAT'S surely a good reason this can't work..." until I dug in and (to my great surprise) found a way.
hi! yep! this definitely happened. I do mention it in the next "why" video, but it's good feedback to know this is interesting to people because I could say a bit more about what those rejections were like - specifically the one where I failed the technical screening.
I'm actually really excited to share that part of the story because I hope it can be a small thing in the back of people's mind to help them if it happens to them. It can happen to anyone. Interviews are SUCH a lossy process and most engineers I know don't have any training on how to do interviews at all - yet we just assume they know how to evaluate people's skillsets.
I was crushed and embarrassed. Yep. Not even gonna lie.
I used to work on Insomnia at Kong, which is literally a frontend for cURL. But some of the questions I couldn't answer were like "how do you get headers with cURL". I DON'T FRIGGIN KNOW. THAT'S WHY I WORKED ON A GUI FOR CURL. I CAN'T STAND USING THE CLI. lol. But to them, it was a question they were supposed to ask, and I got it wrong. Same story for questions about the git CLI DX (I'm a GitKraken fanatic lol), and more like that.
I would rate my confidence overall as being quite low. Well. I donno how to explain what I'm trying to say. It's not that it's low or high, it's that I don't factor it in a lot in what I decide to do. Where I've noticed some people dip their toe in, I find it easy to just cannon-ball into the frozen lake without needing a lot of justification. That's what I meant in the video about "close-enough-manship". I'm a sort of personality that spends a lot of time just failing miserably over and over again in the least efficient way possible until I get what I'm looking for - and I usually quickly move on before I learn what I could have done better, lol. I've been told that my comfort in the face of non-stop-failures is what confidence is, but I donno if that sounds right.
Getting a job these days is really tough on the psyche.
You have coding skills. Some marketing and video production skills. Self discipline and persistence. The time to spend 18hr days on a project. Why look for employment? Start your own business.
are you some kind of fortune teller!? haha. so that's so funny you say that because that, too, is a big part of the story. actually I was gearing up to do exactly that - but everything blew up in my face and this Doom project was, in many ways, my way of picking up the pieces from the rubble.
there's another reason, which is that I really get a lot of energy from working with other people. it makes me really happy. and right now especially I really love the people I work with. I learned this lesson the hard way in my stint contracting - because the inter-personal relationships are very different when you're there one day and gone the next (as a contractor).
(author here) _yes I realize how ridiculous what I'm about to say is considering the project I just shared_ but I actually strongly disagree, haahah. there's this thing I learned of called "the turing tarpit". my position is that just because something could theoretically be done with infinite time and infinite resources, doesn't mean you can even approach the throne of doing it for real in a human lifetime.
And if I'm just totally wrong on this, then you have your answer on why I never gave up on this project. I never once, ever, at any point, lost hope that it wouldn't work (HOW COULD IT?!).... right up until the very instant when I couldn't deny it anymore and it was on the screen in front of me.
Of course you're right, and I should have put quotes around "just". It would be amusing to calculate how long it would take to render the Google home page via Doom via TypeScript; I'd guess much longer than the age of the universe.
> And if I'm just totally wrong on this, then you have your answer on why I never gave up on this project. I never once, ever, at any point, lost hope that it wouldn't work (HOW COULD IT?!).... right up until the very instant when I couldn't deny it anymore and it was on the screen in front of me.
Has this experience changed your way of thinking at all? It sounds like the thing people thought was possible actually was possible, and that Turing completeness really did mean what people thought it did.
Off topic, but as an obsessive debugger and experimenter with ADHD and someone who hates telling people lies about what can and can't be done your motivation speaks to my soul. But my usual rabbit holes last just few hours up to few days. And even those that go far (that avoided all obstacles) end up right before implementing the last step, when it becomes obvious to me that this thing can be done. Congrats on the sheer stamina.
I might use lesson you provided in my future to actually achieve something. I just need to doubt the feasibility of even the last step.
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