otto schnurr

software engineer

Hello DigitalFish!

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

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


“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

Vikings Who Roam the Earth

viking cat

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

Painting John Locke

John Lock by Nico Di Mattia

More time-lapse paintings by Nico De Mattia.

Uncertainty

All that you do will inevitably be flavored with uncertainty...

Tolstoy, in the Age Before Typewriters, re-wrote War & Peace eight times and was still revising galley proofs as it finally rolled onto the press. William Kennedy gamely admitted that he re-wrote his own novel Legs eight times, and that "seven times it came out no good. Six times it was especially no good. The seventh time out it was pretty good, though it was way too long. My son was six years old by then and so was my novel and they were both about the same height..."

Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending. The risks are obvious: you may never get to the end of the sentence at all - or having gotten there, you may not have said anything...

Simply put, making art is chancy - it doesn't mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the pre-requisite to succeeding.

- David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art & Fear


“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

- Steven Pressfield, The War of Art


“Leap and the net will appear.”

- Zen saying