otto schnurr

Back From the Grave

Otto Schnurr — 2010-01-04T12:18:02-05:00

A 28 month lapse kills a blog, so thank you for stopping by and checking out the corpse I lay before you now. I've been thinking over some new ideas to talk about. Many things have happened since the last entry.

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.

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.

I look forward to when more people are able to see what Reflex is all about.

Proprietary Portfolios

The bubble of 2008 was hard on everyone and in December of that year I was off on my own. One issue that had been on my mind for some time was a public example of my expertise. I have a body of professional work that extends over a dozen years. It's good stuff that I'm quite proud of.

But none of it is my property.

Many software engineers deal with this dilemma. The code we write is typically internal and proprietary. Imagine spending your career writing four novels that no one has permission to read. "I'm a good writer," you assure a potential employer or client. "I've polished this skill for over a decade." But how would they know? Without being able to read your stuff, how would anyone know?

Would I hire a writer without reading at least one example of their work? Probably not, but employers in the software industry face this dilemma every day. Many good pieces of advice are out there on how to interview programmers, but it's the writing equivalent of proof-reading an article or composing an email.

"Craftsmanship is a self-sustaining system ... where status is based purely on the work you've done."

- Pete McBreen

Instead of seeing how an author puts together a paragraph, I'd rather see how they craft a chapter. Better yet, I'd like to see how they put a book together. Hearing them talk about building a book might offer some insight, but I'd much rather read the book itself.

If you scale this analogy to its conclusion, software companies are not hiring programmers to build paragraphs in isolation. They are building books.

And how does one hire a book writer without being able to read his or her books?

Hello Short List

I've been working on a "book" of my own called Short List. It runs on the iPhone and was approved for sale on the App Store last month.

I could go into more details about how the app works, but I've delegated that task to another website.

Hello DigitalFish!

Otto Schnurr — 2007-08-22T12:55:44-07:00

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

Simplicity

Otto Schnurr — 2007-06-04T13:54:30-07:00

"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

“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

“Simplicity carried to the extreme becomes elegance.”

- Jon Franklin

Reliability

Otto Schnurr — 2007-05-09T13:23:26-07:00

"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