The Story of the Rules
The Rules of Programming were born of exasperation.
I’d spent about a decade running programming teams at Microsoft, then cofounded the video game company Sucker Punch in 1997. Both companies have been successful—in large part because of their ability to recruit and develop top-notch programming teams. At Sucker Punch, that’s led to a 25-year run of successful games. There were the three Sly Cooper games, which let kids of all ages experience the thrilling life of the master raccoon thief Sly Cooper and his pals. There were the five inFamous games, which gave gamers superpowers and the choice to use them for good or evil. And then there’s what is to this point our magnum opus, Ghost of Tsushima, where gamers play a lone samurai fighting back against the 1274 invasion of Japan.1
A big part of the recruiting strategy at both Microsoft and Sucker Punch has been hiring smart young programmers, then training them in the ways of professional developers. This practice has been undeniably successful, but it also leads to a particular flavor of frustration.
I kept running into one problem over and over again. We’d bring a new programmer onto the team, often someone fresh out of college. I’d review some new feature they planned to introduce into the code, usually to solve a very simple problem—only to discover that they’d written code that attempted to solve a much bigger problem, one that included the very simple and concrete problem as a small subcase.
Aargh! We ...