Ramble follows, in response to Specialization [Nothing to See Here]:
I have trouble sleeping because I'm thinking about all of the problems I still have to solve in the engine. I'll lie in bed and be completely unable to fall asleep because my brain will be chewing on layout engine bugs. Or I'll fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night because my dumbass brain has found a solution to some problem and it just has to share the solution with me even if it's 4am. Thanks brain. Really.
Boy, do I feel that pain. Especially last December. And November. And October. And September. Especially since I am not a morning person; I seem to do my best hacking after I've got a few meals in me, and I seem to do my best hacking after the sun has gone down. And naturally, if I give in to this temptation, my brain will be whirring so fast by the time I try to go to "sleep" that there will be nothing to do for it but read trash until 4 in the morning and spend the next day ingesting a carefully metered mash of Dr. Pepper and eggs.
I don't think that I can say to have specialized, though, other in that "the computer is my obsessive life. love the computer," way. (When you start getting the dreams about how awful it would be if you lost your laptop, then you should get worried. Especially if it leads to elaborate fantasies about finally setting up that home network backup server.) I've always been interested in building low-level architectural services, and I've pretty much done that consistently. I've always been interested in how computers mix with communication, and I've pretty much done that consistently. But the ways in which I have done that have varied dramatically, based on my current location.
I got my latest gig partially because when were divvying out parts, everyone else said "Eric likes computer games, he'll know something about OpenGL." The first part was true then, and I guess the latter part is true now, but most of my graphics knowledge has been hard-won over the past few years just by showing up and having an idea in my head that I've been obsessively working towards. Happily, it's all turning out pretty well :). What surprised me, though, were the ways in which building software for moving huge chunks of image data from disk to screen in attractive, just-in-time ways was not that much different from buiding software to get data from database to offline laptop in useful, when-needed ways. It's all about perceived performance, and not paying attention to that guy behind the curtain. And dancing as fast as you can. 10:38:35 AM () 
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