Saturday, June 27, 2015

Life

Life the last few months has been fun.  I have been feeling restless and craving adventure.

The weather last winter was amazing - in the 40s F every day, warm enough to not need a jacket to walk around.  We're paying for it now with our hot summer - hitting the 90s F. 

Nonetheless, we try to enjoy the beautiful outdoors with its lush greenery.  Today we hiked Wallace Falls State Park with our good friends, B and P.   There is something innately soothing about tall moss-filled trees, ferns, and waterfalls. 

Work: graphics performance analysis

Being an engineer at heart, I love hearing about what people do for work or for their hobbies, because I am fascinated by processes. 

In case you are curious about my job, it is to make my team's product cool 8-).  In the thermal sense.

Program managers provide us with pain points - places where they want less latency or power usage.

We are lucky in that our job is made quite simple by sophisticated tools that have been provided to us, in order to measure, visualize, and understand the factors that contribute to latency and power usage: the utilization of various processors and co-processors, and the bandwidth on various memory buses. This helps us identify bottlenecks and figure out where and how to optimize code. 

I love performance analysis and working on platform code - it is data-driven, and involves a lot of creative thinking and problem solving.  I love getting a chance to take the time to scrub code until it shines. I prefer platform development to application development, which I feel is more fast-paced and feature-driven, and places less emphasis on being solidly written.