bamabhai
Nov 28, 2015
Undergraduate / Bad Spaghetti - Stanford Supplement (Intellectual Vitality) [5]
Wrote this for early admission but didn't apply. Wondering if I should keep this.
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Have you ever heard of genocide with bad spaghetti?
That's exactly what the code of my first game 'Particles' was capable of. It was convoluted, tangled and ugly, just like bad spaghetti. It also committed genocide against every principle of coding propriety written in stone.
To the despair of all the programming perfectionists out there though, it ran perfectly. My game did all it intended to. The controls, the effects, the execution showed no sign of error. Yet every look at the underlying code shortened two years of my life and every run caused a programming god somewhere to plan an apocalypse.
There I was, conflicted as ever, and pondering over the age old question: Do the ends justify the means?
My conscience disagreed and as the ghost of Machiavelli sighed in disappointment, I pressed delete on my keyboard, thereby bidding adieu to three months of hard work.
I wasn't content to just patch things up. Fixing this monstrosity meant starting from square one. I was determined not to have an asterisk on this personal first, this milestone which stated how shoddy my effort was.
Two months later, Particles was resurrected. There was no more bad spaghetti. The ends may not always justify the means but it certainly helps to justify the means with the end. My means, the total effort of five months I spent learning and relearning game development were definitely vindicated by the end result; a clean piece of software I could be proud to call my own.
Wrote this for early admission but didn't apply. Wondering if I should keep this.
_____________________________________________________________________
Have you ever heard of genocide with bad spaghetti?
That's exactly what the code of my first game 'Particles' was capable of. It was convoluted, tangled and ugly, just like bad spaghetti. It also committed genocide against every principle of coding propriety written in stone.
To the despair of all the programming perfectionists out there though, it ran perfectly. My game did all it intended to. The controls, the effects, the execution showed no sign of error. Yet every look at the underlying code shortened two years of my life and every run caused a programming god somewhere to plan an apocalypse.
There I was, conflicted as ever, and pondering over the age old question: Do the ends justify the means?
My conscience disagreed and as the ghost of Machiavelli sighed in disappointment, I pressed delete on my keyboard, thereby bidding adieu to three months of hard work.
I wasn't content to just patch things up. Fixing this monstrosity meant starting from square one. I was determined not to have an asterisk on this personal first, this milestone which stated how shoddy my effort was.
Two months later, Particles was resurrected. There was no more bad spaghetti. The ends may not always justify the means but it certainly helps to justify the means with the end. My means, the total effort of five months I spent learning and relearning game development were definitely vindicated by the end result; a clean piece of software I could be proud to call my own.