Name: Anonymous 2012-09-01 21:56
Sup /prog/, what inspires you to program outside of work? My inspiration to do programming outside of work is the demoscene. I believe demoscene to be the only real place a programmer can be free. Free to create anything one can imagine through mathematics, physics, algorithms and brutal coding. There are no requirements, no customers to please, no manager to give you deadlines, nothing but your own creativity, curiosity and intelligence to create whatever you wish. Forget about IDEs, editors, programming languages, and operating systems for they are not important, it is the ability to do anything with anything that is what is important in the demoscene. I have seen programs which construct buildings and then tear them apart into little pieces. I have seen pictures that zoom in and become mosaics of more pictures and the processes repeated 20 times over. I have seen 3-D fractals the mind cannot imagine but which only math can make. Some of the things I see, I can reverse engineer in mind and code and understand how it works. Other times, I have no idea what is going on and my mind is blown. Those times, I don't have the slightest clue what I am looking at. To me the demoscene is a whole other universe in itself. Creating demoscene for me is all about trusting my own abilities. I remember when I first started programming 3d graphics I tried to convince my friends in university to try it as well. Everyone said it was too hard and they didn't to mess around with 3-D coordinate systems and polygons. The only way one can become good at demoscene is to not fear anything. Not fear that anything is too hard and just start coding. After I achieved this, it was as if a great weight was lifted from me, it is one of the best feelings in the world. Since then, I have found that anything I can think of, I can program, whether it be iterated function system fractals, dynamical systems, convolution filters, software synthesizers, navier stokes discrete simulations... Having worked in the audio/video drivers industry reading gigantic manuals for ogg vorbis encoding standards, programming operating systems for cell phones and now programming for optical transport, I am now completely desensitized to complexity and can handle any amount imaginable. I no longer fear complexity. To me, complexity is my friend, without it, coding would be too easy and therefore boring. Now, demoscene has become the ultimate hobby where I can challenge myself. As a fellow programmer, I hope that all programmers can find something that inspires them and open new doors to new universes. There are unimaginable things out there and I can only feel sorry for those who never witness these things in their life.