Location: Remote, Canada

Technologies : C, C++, SIMD, OpenGL, WebGL, WASM, JS, TS

Interests : systems programming, compilers, 2D & 3D graphics, performance

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Hello, my name is Jesse.

I describe myself as a competent generalist, and a lifelong learner. I'm frequently working on something I've never done before. I've worked at every level of the stack, from cycle-shaving hot loops to the frontend of large web applications. My most recent professional experience has been about a year at a semiconductor startup; I wrote prototypes for an ISA, compiler, a cycle simulator and visual debugger.

In terms of hard technical skills, I can quickly become productive in nearly any language, and at any level of the stack. I'm comfortable working in heavily multithreaded/async soft-realtime environments where performance is a key acceptance criteria. I have a good understanding of modern hardware architectures, including GPUs, from main memory to registers and instruction pipelines. I have working knowledge of interpreters, dynamic language runtimes and garbage collectors. I'm convinced I can learn nearly anything (albeit some things more quickly than others), given an appropriate problem domain to apply it to.

In terms of business value, I can take hand-wavy visions of new products and turn them into working prototype(s), quickly. I'm comfortable refining those raw materials and delivering real value to customers, internal or external. I have a track record of successfully identifying 80/20 solutions and love the feeling of making tools that make peoples lives better.

In my personal life, I enjoy travelling, surfing, climbing, backcountry skiing, snowmobiling, pirates, and attending raves. I like the phrase "have strong opinions, weakly held".

If I was born to do one thing in this world, it's program computers.

Jesse

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https://scallywag.software

https://scallywag.software/resume.html

https://github.com/scallyw4g

jesse@scallywag.software

In my experience, relying on the compiler to auto vectorize your code is a path fraught with peril.

It'll break eventually. If it matters, write the simd yourself. It'll probably be 2-50x better than the compiler anyways.

That's hella cute

> powerful compile-time and metaprogramming capabilities

While I agree that, generally, compile time metaprogramming is a tremendously powerful tool, the C++ template metaprogramming implementation is hilariously bad.

Why, for example, is printing the source-code text of an enum value so goddamn hard?

Why can I not just loop over the members of a class?

How would I generate debug vis or serialization code with a normal-ish looking function call (spoiler, you can't, see cap'n proto, protobuf, flatbuffers, any automated dearimgui generator)

These things are incredibly basic and C++ just completely shits all over itself when you try to do them with templates

> Why, for example, is printing the source-code text of an enum value so goddamn hard?

Aside from this being trivial in C++26, imo it isn't actually that tricky. Here's a very quick implementation I made awhile ago: https://github.com/Cons-Cat/libCat/blob/3f54e47f0ed182771fce...

> Aside from this being trivial in C++26

Great, it took them 51 years to make a trivial operation trivial. Call me next millennium when they start to figure out the nontrivial stuff, I guess.

Did you read the article? This is called reflection, and is exactly what C++26 introduces.

Yeah, like 50 years too late.

> The C (near-) subset of C++ is (modulo standard libraries) a starting point for this; just adding on templates for type system power (and not for other exotic uses) goes a long way.

In my experience, this is absolutely true. I wrote my own metaprogramming frontend for C and that's basically all you need. At this point, I consider the metaprogramming facilities of a language it's most important feature, by far. Everything else is pretty much superfluous by comparison

This somehow reminds me of the days when the fastest way to deep copy an object in javascript was to round trip through toString. I thought that was gross then, and I think this is gross now

This should be the top comment

Love this.

As an aside, if the author reads this, did you consider using bitfields for the superposition state (ie, what options are available for a tile)? I did a wfc implementation a while back and moved to bitfields after a while.. the speedup was incredible. It became faster to just recompute a chunk from scratch than backtrack because the inner loop was nearly completely branchless. I think my chunks were 100 tiles cubed or something.

> I did a wfc implementation a while back and moved to bitfields after a while.. the speedup was incredible.

Yeah, my WFC bot (which happens to generate Carcassonne maps in an amusing coincidence) eventually ended up using https://github.com/bits-and-blooms/bitset which improved things hugely.

> It became faster to just recompute a chunk from scratch

Kinda what mine does - every now and again[0] it stacks the current state and if it gets stuck, just pops the last one and continues from there.

[0] Just checked and it's every `tileCount / 20` iterations, hilariously in a variable named `tenper`. I hate past me.

I read an 'i hate myself' post one time where someone encountered a variable named leghands. Obviously, it had once read legendHandles, and had since been helpfully shortened by the author.

> If you need to wait YEARS ...

Imagine working on voyager II .. or some old-ass banking software that still runs RPG (look it up, I'll wait), or trying to hire someone to do numerical analysis for the genesis of a format that supercedes IEEE float .. or .. whatever.

There are many applications for extremely specific skillsets out there. Suggesting otherwise is, in my opinion, clearly unwise

Thanks for your work on Zulip!

I have some feedback that's annoyingly non-specific.

I used Zulip a few years ago as a contractor. It seemed _fine_, but I didn't love it. Specifically, the UI felt sluggish and generally the experience was somewhat unpolished. Maybe things have changed, a lot happens in a couple years, but there you go

Just about every UI component has been redesigned over the last two years. So your experience may be different these days :).