15 video games

Scott Brown put me up to this. The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen video games you've played that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

Here are my 15, in the order I thought of them:

1. Secret of Monkey Island
2. Red Dead Redemption
3. Grim Fandango
4. Grand Theft Auto 4
5. Heavy Rain
6. Braid
7. Police Quest
8. Space Quest
9. Jagged Alliance
10. X-COM
11. Mass Effect
12. Shadow President
13. Sim City
14. Zork
15. Limbo

Good memories.

Keeping a large production website online is just like this

I just wish we could do it with the same level of serenity that these plate spinners appear to possess.

Each one of those plates is a server or server process just waiting to crash land on your buddy's serene head.

Actually, good lord, look at what they're doing. And you thought you had a hard job. Try spinning plates on a stage for a living while dressed up in a fancy Chinese silk bodice and standing on your head on top of someone else's head. This seems like cruel and unusual punishment. 

I think that's why it's so entertaining. As Mel Brooks said, tragedy is when I get a paper cut, and comedy is when you fall in a hole and die. Or as it were, spin plates with an absurd serenity.

Crunch mode doesn't work. Working over 21 hours continuously is like being drunk.

When used long-term, Crunch Mode slows development and creates more bugs when compared with 40-hour weeks.

More than a century of studies show that long-term useful worker output is maximized near a five-day, 40-hour workweek. Productivity drops immediately upon starting overtime and continues to drop until, at approximately eight 60-hour weeks, the total work done is the same as what would have been done in eight 40-hour weeks.

In the short term, working over 21 hours continuously is equivalent to being legally drunk. Longer periods of continuous work drastically reduce cognitive function and increase the chance of catastrophic error. In both the short- and long-term, reducing sleep hours as little as one hour nightly can result in a severe decrease in cognitive ability, sometimes without workers perceiving the decrease.

via archives.igda.org

Only probably way less fun.

Hat tip Eston Bond