John Carmack — Dopest Guy in Tech
John Carmack was the lead programmer at id Software and one of the “founding fathers” of the DOOM games (which I talk about here!). He now acts as a consulting CTO at Oculus VR. He’s also working on an AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) startup, called Keen Technologies.
I think he’s a pretty cool guy in tech, not just because of his technical ingenuity nor the things that he create, but because of his views about software engineering and all things related, I also find the advices he gave during keynotes and/or interviews are pretty good and worth highlighting.
True Madlad
I can’t do justice retelling the man’s entire history as a key figure in tech/gaming, but I’ll just jot down some of the things that he has done/accomplished to truly show how wild and interesting this man actually is.
When he was 14 years old, he really wants to get an Apple II computer for his own. At the time, there was a school at a wealthy neighborhood that had one in their building. Carmack devised a plan to use Thermite and Vaseline to melt through the school windows to break in and snatch the computers (…similar to that one episode in Breaking Bad). Unfortunately his plan foiled when one of his accomplices got stuck at the windows, and John had to spend one year in juvenile home.
After that, he went to college (which is not for him), and dropped out after two semesters. He got a stable job developing games at Softdisk, during his time there, he had a dream to entirely change the gaming industry. He and his close colleagues worked day and night for it and launched their very first game, Commander Keen. After that, he quit Softdisk to create his own company, id Software.
His time in id Software (the engines, technical marvel, and the games that he brought the table) truly revolutionized gaming at the time. You can read more about it at my medium blog above (shameless plug :D). To mention a few, here are a few of his works: DOOM series, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake series, etc.
In early 2000s, he became interested in rocketry. So after revolutionizing the gaming industry, he casually became interested rocket science and started his own company, Armadillo Aerospace. What a transition. The company competed in NASA’s Lunar Lander challenge in 2008 and won first place, winning $350k. He now acts as a consulting CTO for Oculus VR, and started growing his company in AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), Keen Technologies.
So, he went from breaking into schools (burglary), revolutionized the gaming industry, casually decided to do rocket science, and is now a consultant to one of the biggest VR company in the world. I guess he’s an opportunist, just bored, talented, or all of the three. But whatever the case is, his life story is one of the more unexpected ones I’ve found in tech.
Learn Things Deeply
He has this “learn deeply” pitch, basically when you learn something, learning it in depth, not just surface level.
Sure, this doesn’t apply to everyone, since we sometimes as software engineers only learn something a bit lazily and as necessary as possible, we want to do practical work quick.
I don’t apply this principle all the time, but sometimes I try to apply this when I’m learning a new tech. An example is when I’m learning Terraform and IaC during an intern. Practically, I could just learn what terraform is, so that I’m sufficient enough to do terraform plan , terraform apply , yada yada. But at the time, I try to push further by learning how terraform works in the background, how it came to fruition, and more fundamental things about it. It gave me more understanding of system design, cloud technologies, and more appreciation of the engineering work behind it.
Still Learning
He has a fascination of learning, and he is very oriented on delivering/building products. In that article, he is learning Racket to develop his own scripting language for VR at Oculus.
Learning techs fast (or at least get a grasp on what a tech is), I think is very beneficial, since the tech lifecycle is very dynamic, technologies come and die pretty quick. Knowing the trends is also pretty beneficial.
Enjoy What You Do
Carmack is well known for being a workaholic and having a laser focus when he’s working on something. Something I learned from him, albeit not directly, is to enjoy what you do.
This is an excerpt from his plan file
Many game developers are in it only for the final product, and the process is just what they have to go through to get there. I respect that, but my motivation is a bit different.For me, while I do take a lot of pride in shipping a great product, the achievements along the way are more memorable.
Very Articulate and Charming
This is probably not special to him. But I really do enjoy listening to him, watch his interviews, his keynotes, and anything he talks about. He is very charming in his own way and very articulate with how he expresses his train of thoughts. Maybe this is something I subconsciously notice and try to apply myself, since I was very timid and very shy when talking to people, especially in public.
Seeing him effortlessly give technical talks, share his views, and pour his love to whatever he is doing at the time kinda pushed me to be more vocal as well.
