After a while of playing Diablo 3 it’s probably about time for me to publish my own opinion on the game. A warning: I was never really a Diablo 2 fan (at the time when it was big I was mostly playing a game called “Visual C++” :) ) so consider it a noob review if you want to :) Like many people out there, I started out as a Monk.
The title says it all, but I probably still should paint some background to this article. Imagine a system where you need very high performance, you need it yesterday, and you don’t have infinite funds to simply throw more hardware at the problem. Very important component in this system is a web server. Very simple requests, always generated by code (while system in question does not provide data to end users, you can think of AJAX - definitely there’s a similarity).
I was recently confronted with very interesting misconception: that Agile and SCRUM are the same thing. It really got me thinking. First, it means that one must be very careful when using the word “agile” in software development context. Less obvious: SCRUM is de facto standard agile method today, and very often the only one people know or heard about. Wikipedia lists 10+ different methods falling under “Agile” umbrella. It’s no suprise because agile manifesto is very vague and does not really tell much (if anything) about the how part.
It was quite some time ago when my company started using Fusion-IO (enterprise SSDs) on our database servers. We are happily using them till this day. The great part is that we could scale vertically and leave software layer unchanged. Even better: we still have room for growth, despite getting more users and our application stack getting more and more demanding. We were one of the first to switch to SSDs on server side - so right now it’s interesting that this idea propagated so quickly.
Recently I somehow found enough time to read “OpenGL SuperBible, 5th edition”. It was something done purely for fun, just to see how things are looking today for modern graphics APIs. Last time I did any serious graphics programming, OpenGL was slowly dying. In fact, my M.Sc. thesis used Direct3D as implementation API. I simply had no choice. There was no standard for anything - every single important feature was exposed through extensions.
Today was the day when PlayStation Vita launched worldwide. I had the chance to play most of the launch games already during GDC Europe last August and I think that both hardware and launch lineup are impressive. But I didn’t buy PS Vita on launch. It’s probably a very sad day for Sony, bacause “PlayStation” is my religion (on Facebook, at least :) ). What happended? I faced the truth - mainstream mobile gaming is already on Android and iOS, and a lot of titles are released every day.