Programming

Ati vazut mai nou ce a zis CG? “Nu ma intereseaza firmele straine. Cei care acum lucreaza la firme straine vor lucra pentru firme romanesti”. Cum e lasat acest om sa fie inca in politica?…

My first real job was in 1994 for a company that made network cards, and external network interfaces, for printers. I wrote the software that set up the cards and helper drivers to print to them.

My software was terrible. I had to write it for all platforms and by god it was awful. So many IT folk must have grown a lot of grey hair fighting my shit code trying to get printers on the network.

I once told this story to an aged colleague who paused for a moment before saying ‘I might have to punch you now’.

So if you suffered at the hands of ‘PRINTSET’ trying to get the damn office printer to work… I am truly sorry. If it helps: I never wrote software again after that.

hey y'all, i'm hyperneutrino, an AoC youtuber with a decent following. i've been competing for several years and AoC has been an amazing experience and opportunity for me. it's no secret that there is a big issue with people cheating with LLMs by automating solving these problems and getting times that no human will ever achieve, and it's understandably leading to a bunch of frustration and discouragement

i reached out to eric yesterday to discuss this problem. you may have seen the petition put up a couple of days ago; i started that to get an idea of how many people cared about the issue and it seems i underestimated just how impacted this community is. i wanted to share some of the conversation we had and hopefully open up some conversation about this as this is an issue i think everyone sort of knows can't be 100% solved but wishes weren't ignored

eric's graciously given me permission to share our email thread, so if you'd like to read the full thread, i've compiled it into a google doc here, but i'll summarize it below and share some thoughts on it:

in short, it's really hard to prove if someone is using an LLM or not; there isn't really a way we can check. some people post their proof and i do still wish they were banned, but screening everyone isn't too realistic and people would just hide it better if we started going after them, so it would take extra time without being a long-term solution. i think seeing people openly cheat with no repercussions is discouraging, but i must concede that eric is correct that it ultimately wouldn't change much

going by time wouldn't work either; some times are pretty obviously impossible but there's a point where it's just suspicion and we've seen some insanely fast human solutions before LLMs were even in the picture, and if we had some threshold for time that was too fast to be possible, it would be easy for the LLM cheaters to just add a delay into their automated process to avoid being too fast while still being faster than any human; plus, setting this threshold in a way that doesn't end up impacting real people would be very difficult

ultimately, this issue can't be solved because AoC is, by design, method-agnostic, and using an LLM is also a method however dishonest it is. for nine years, AoC mostly worked off of asking people nicely not to try to break the website, not to upload their inputs and problem statements, not to try to copy the site, and not to use LLMs to get on the global leaderboard. very sadly, this has changed this year, and it's not just that more people are cheating, it's that people explicitly do not care about or respect eric's work. he told me he got emails from people saying they saw the request not to use LLMs to cheat and said they did not respect his work and would do it anyway, and when you're dealing with people like that, there's not much you can do as this relied on the honor system before

all in all, the AoC has been an amazing opportunity for me and i hope that some openness will help alleviate some of the growing tension and distrust. if you have any suggestions, please read the email thread first as we've covered a bunch of the common suggestions i've gotten from my community, but if we missed anything, i'd be more than happy to continue the discussion with eric. i hope things do get better, and i think in the next few days we'll start seeing LLMs start to struggle, but the one thing i wish to conclude with is that i hope we all understand that eric is trying his best and working extremely hard to run the AoC and provide us with this challenge, and it's disheartening that people are disrespecting this work to his face

i hope we can continue to enjoy and benefit from this competition in our own ways. as someone who's been competing on the global leaderboard for years, it is definitely extremely frustrating, but the most important aspect of the AoC is to enjoy the challenge and develop your coding skills, and i hope this community continues to be supportive of this project and have fun with it

thanks 💜

Hi folks, I'm a AAA lead tech designer who left AAA (of my own choice, rather than laid off) after 7+ years at studios like R* North, Build a Rocket Boy and Splash Damage, to go solo-indie last year, May 2023, and make my own game!

I just passed the 10k Wishlist milestone this week (during the weird wishlist blackout) and wanted to do a quick post (mid?)-mortem of what's worked so far, what hasn't, and what I'm yet to try. Maybe it'll be helpful to someone, so strap in for a wall of text.

My game is - it's a narrative-driven futuristic sci-fi survival-crafter, with a fairly unique top-down style and low-poly aesthetic.

I do not have a publisher, and I'm self-funded (and received a grant from the UK Games Fund - massive shout-out to them! <3).

For some context, survival-craft/base-building games are a huge and largely successful genre on Steam, which gives you a bit of a head-start on things compared to making a game in a smaller and less marketable genre. I also happen to love them and wanted to make a game in this genre, which helps make the game the best it can be (because if you're going to work on it full time, you better enjoy it!).

I have a roughly 8% wishlist deletion rate, which is pretty average according to . I also don't think it means very much.

There are two main wishlist-mega-spike events, which I'll cover in a bit more detail:

1. Launching the demo, getting first content creator coverage (especially SplatterCatGaming).

2. Steam's Space Exploration Festival (and updated demo).

Importance of a good demo, and coverage by creators.

It feels like a bit of an obvious one, but in my experience, your demo is your BIGGEST ticket to success. Unless your game is that one in a million that goes viral on Twitter or whatever from an amazing gif, this is the way you're going to be able to get people to see and wishlist your game.

My game isn't the flashiest, but I think it plays really well. I have focused a lot on smoothness of gameplay, attention to detail, QOL features, etc. and people notice this and greatly enjoy the game when they play. Having a demo, which I've kept up ever since and continue to make sure is stable and very high quality, means people can immediately see whether it's a game they enjoy when they find it on Steam, see it online, whatever.

When the demo first released, I reached out via email to (primarily YouTube) creators who cover this genre of game, sent them a key (ahead of the public release, people love 'exclusives' and early access to stuff) and a little info about the game, about me, and an eye-catching gif of the game. Almost all of them, eventually, covered it.

I was fortunate enough to have SplatterCatGaming, along with other big creators like Wanderbots, feature the demo. This drove MASSIVE traffic to the game and generated the first mega-spike in my wishlist graph.

I'll be honest - creator outreach is a ballache. It's why there are entire companies that charge you or take your revenue to do it. It takes a long time, it's boring, YouTube and platforms make it really hard to find the contact info, and a lot of the time you won't get a reply. THAT SAID, creators are the way that SO many consumers find new games, and you just cannot avoid doing it, so suck it up and spend the time! I will be spending more time, and covering more platforms, doing this for release, because I have now learned just how important it is.

You're in a better time than EVER before to release a good demo and get some traction - Steam now let you actually email + notify your existing wishlisters about your demo, and if it does well enough, you get a whole 'new and trending' placement! My demo was a bit before these changes, unfortunately, but if it had already been the case, my demo would have made new + trending and been an even bigger success. That could be you!

TL;DR - Make a good, high quality demo, spend time sending it to content creators.

Importance of Steam festivals

Steam is where your customers are, it's THE most important platform for you to focus on. That means good Steam page, good capsules/key art (I'm actually about to have mine re-done as I think it underperforms), good demo.

Other than working on these areas, because the algorithm is king on Steam, the ONLY action you can take to promote your game on Steam is participating in Festivals. They are REALLY important. This is when Steam shows your game to your potential customers above almost all others on the platform, and gives you massive visibility. USE IT. Enter EVERY festival you can.

Steam's schedule for events this coming year unfortunately means I'll likely only have Next Fest before release to enter again, but 2024 was pretty good - the Survival Crafting Festival and the Space Exploration Festival.

I knew the Space Exploration Festival was going to be a good opportunity for a marketing beat, so I prepped a lot for it. I made a huge update to the demo so that it was better than ever, I reached out to new content creators to cover it in the lead-up to the festival, I updated the Steam Store page with new gifs, I released a new trailer, and I paid for ads on Reddit. All of this together drove massive traffic to the store page at the start of the festival, getting the game a front page placement along with massive games like The Alters and others.

The game and demo stayed on the front page features (most popular upcoming and most played demo sections) for the duration of the festival, and this was bringing thousands of visits to the store page over the duration of the festival. It's massive. This one festival generated thousands of wishlists.

TL;DR - Opt into any festivals you can (except Next Fest until the final one before you release) and put your best food forward - make sure your game shines from your store page, you have an amazing demo, you generate momentum going into the festival, etc.

Summary: What worked well?

• Demo - Covered in depth earlier, but worth restating.

• Subreddit Posts - Find your target audience on Reddit and start engaging with them. It can be tough in different places due to self-promo rules, but overall, Reddit is the BEST place to find your audience outside of Steam itself. Don't spam, make engaging and interesting posts and content, ENGAGE with comments, and people will respond well.

• Reddit Ads - I've spent about £500 on Reddit ads so far, mainly because there was a 1-1 credit promo in the run-up to the aforementioned Space Exploration Fest and I used this to generate extra momentum as described in that section. I've had a good return on Reddit ads from what I can see, and apart from anything else, it is a great traffic generator to tell Steam that your game has some interest.

Summary: What hasn't worked well?

• Press Outreach - At the same time I reached out to content creators at every major marketing beat (primarily initial demo launch and Space Exploration Fest demo update), I reached out to a long list of gaming press. I didn't get one single reply or piece of coverage. My hunch is that because of the complete gutting of games journalism, if you don't go viral on Twitter and you're not either a AAA game with in-house marketing people who have connections with journos directly, OR have contacts yourself/someone you're paying with contacts, you're just not going to get covered. There's not enough time, and you won't generate enough ad clicks. Luckily, people get their game recommendations from content creators now, so it's worth focusing more there.

Summary: What am I yet to try?

• Ads on any other platform - some people swear by Twitter, some by Facebook, some by TikTok... I have yet to try any paid ads on these platforms as Reddit has performed so well, but it's something I plan to do. Probably Facebook primarily so I don't have to give Elon any money. I'd be interested to hear from other devs who've done this and how it performed.

If you made it to the end of this wall of text, nice one!

I hope this was useful in some way, and I'm happy to answer your questions about the game, my marketing strategy, details of anything above, my time in AAA/transition to indie, etc. Oh, and go read up on anything Chris Zukowski's written - he's the guru of games marketing, and talks a lot of sense. Do your own research too, but his stuff is a great baseline.

Keep up the good work!

Background:
I’ve been an SDE at Amazon for over 3 years, but never got promoted. Why? Because I kept switching teams whenever I felt stagnant in my learning. For me, it was always learning > money back then, and I still stand by that mindset—until recently, when I realized f learning, retire early with more $$. 😅

Preparation:
After deciding to switch, I spent 3 months preparing seriously. Here’s what worked for me:

1. Leetcode: Finding time was hard, but I made it work. I didn’t specifically focus on Meta-tagged questions, but in hindsight, I probably should have—it could’ve helped me avoid fumbling on a couple of interview questions.

2. Behavioral Interviews: This was my Achilles' heel. I used to bomb these. I prepared extensively by gathering common questions and practicing mock interviews. Shoutout to a fantastic manager I met on who gave me actionable feedback that was a game-changer.

3. System Design: I watched Hello Interview Design videos during my commutes to and from office, polishing my skills.

The Interviews:

• Meta: I felt pretty good about my performance overall. My prep paid off, especially for behavioral questions. Clearing this was surreal, and now I’m about to join in a month as an E4 SWE.

• Oracle: I interviewed for an IC3 role, but they offered me IC2 instead, which didn’t make financial sense (their offer was less than my current Amazon comp). While my system design and coding rounds went well, I felt the down-leveling was more about budget constraints than my performance.

Reflection:
This journey has been humbling and lucky in so many ways:

• If Meta had reached out a few months earlier, I wasn’t ready.

• If they’d contacted me a few months later, my visa status would’ve made it impossible. Timing was everything, and I’m grateful for the stars aligning.

Why Am I Sharing This?
This might sound boastful, but honestly, I just needed to vent my excitement. No one from my university has made it to Meta and Amazon before, and I don’t want to make my friends feel bad by oversharing. This community has been a huge inspiration for me, and I hope my story motivates someone else to keep pushing forward.

If you’re prepping for your next big opportunity, know that luck plays a role, but so does hard work and being ready for the right moment.

PS: If you’re looking for referrals at Amazon this month or at Meta starting in January, feel free to DM me. Always happy to help. 😊

Good luck to everyone grinding—your time will come! 💪

I recently started working at a big law firm as part of a four-person DevOps team, and I'm honestly losing my mind. Everything is locked down. I mean, I literally can't download anything. Want zsh? Nope. WSL for a Linux-y environment? Not happening. Need Python scripts or any files from any github repos? Also nope. Need kubens, or any other kubectl plugins? No chance. Want to be an administrator on your own computer? Not gonna happen. ChatGPT to speed up basic scripting tasks? Hah, forget it. Even Chrome extensions are off-limits.

This is all because of the strict security guidelines implemented by the security and networking team. And every single time I want to do something like use some github repo to automate my work I need to open a request to the security team who are physically in a different building and it takes days for them to respond. And the answer is usually no!

The pay is great, but I'm stuck doing a bunch of manual work that I know I could finish in a fraction of the time if I had the right tools. Is this normal at big companies—or am I just in some kind of corporate IT nightmare?

I’m genuinely curious about what the DevOps experience in this regard has been like for other folks here. How do people who once had total freedom in one-man-show type positions adjust to working in such a restricting environment? and are FAANG companies like google or meta just as locked down, or do they handle security in a more flexible way?