Links from the latest newsletters

In the past, I’ve been posting that week’s newsletter on here nearly immediately after it went out to your emails. What I’ve decided to do recently was send out the newsletter every TWO weeks instead of each week, and now post this once a month, thereby combining the newsletters.

I have had a nice couple of weeks without too much work, as I frequently save all of my vacation until the end of the year, like the knucklehead that I am. Fortunately, I bought a PS4 to hold me over, so I’ve been playing Until Dawn (LOVED IT), The Order: 1886 (Liked it), and a crazy amount of Heroes of the Storm. Also started making a tiny project in Unreal Engine 4. What have you been doing?

• Inside Netflix’s plan to boost stream quality and unclog the internet
• Netflix has been working on this new technology since 2011, when members of its video algorithms team realized that they had gotten it all wrong. Like practically everyone else in the online video world, Netflix had been preparing its video files for streaming based on the bandwidth available to consumers. Some Netflix subscribers were accessing the service with slow DSL connections, others had faster cable connections, and a lucky few were already online with super-fast fiber speeds.
• JavaScript developer survey results
• Over 5k developers replied to questions about the types of JS that they write, transpilers used, commenting styles, etc.,
• Unity game engine provides full support for WebGL titles
• Microsoft’s Edge browser has enabled targeted asm.js optimization by default, and Google’s Chrome browser added asm.js to their status tracking board as a defacto standard. In addition, Safari has also made improvements to asm.js performance with the release of their FTLJIT optimizations last year, and included asm.js code in their benchmark JetStream. Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari can now run Unity WebGL on the desktop.
• Microsoft’s Edge JavaScript engine (Chakra) is going open source
• Last week at JSConf US Last Call in Florida, we announced that we will open-source the core components of Chakra as ChakraCore, which will include all the key components of the JavaScript engine powering Microsoft Edge. The ChakraCore sources will be made available on GitHub under the MIT license next month.
• Writing a game engine from scratch, Pt 2 — Memory
• Memory Management. If you think “this is just some C, C++ or ASM thing, my Garbage collected language does that for me” you are in for a ride. The Memory Management in Garbage collected Languages only works well up to a certain point. Garbage Collection in Java for example, has to work in such a wide spectrum of cases, of course it won’t be as perfect for a Game Engine as it could be.
• Coming of age with video games
• One of the most profound effects that a novel can have on the young mind is to reveal a harrowing truth: your life is not the axis on which the world spins. In the pages of a book, you meet people who, incredibly, do not think, act, or live like you, and who, in contrast to those around you in real life, are not there to meet your every need. A video game’s effect is quite the opposite: it offers a world built entirely around the whims of its player. Suddenly and irresistibly, you are able to choose what kind of car you’d like to drive, how to spend your money, what clothes to wear, and whose head you’d like to stomp upon. In video games, children are allowed an element of practical agency that is otherwise unknown within the usual sensible and stifling parameters of childhood.
• Video office tours of nearly 100 startups
• Great series from Tech Crunch, where they explore startup offices in the form of MTV cribs
• Why hiring in tech is so hard
• Talent Shortage, recruiting costs, and the compensation race all contribute
• The five toughest players I’ve ever guarded
• From “The Truth” himself, Paul Pierce, one of my favorite players ever. Not tech related, but I love the NBA and the 76ers are doing terrible (I went to their only win this year, vs Kobe!), so I needed something to cheer me up.