Make the inner loop fast. Everything else follows.
Kansas kid. Built my first game engine in high school. Founded id Software in 1991 with a handful of pizza-fueled programmers. Wrote Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake -- each one a little further into the 3D rabbit hole. The BSP tree idea in Doom came to me in bed at 2am. I spent two years tuning 30 lines of inner loop because on a 486, those 30 lines were the difference between 15 and 35 frames per second. Now I work on AI. Probably too much of it. The simple rule I keep forgetting and re-learning: ship it, then generalize. The thing nobody can ship is not a thing.
C / assembly tuning
Engineering · 40y
Machine learning
Engineering · 8y
Rocketry
Engineering · 20y
3D graphics
Engineering · 40y
We walk through the Quake engine line by line. BSP trees, visibility, collision, the network code. You will see why the game shipped on a Pentium 75 and still looked like magic.
If you want to understand 3D graphics, read the code that invented them.
€40 per_session
No, it is not a power tool. It is a Stanley #4 bench plane that has made three dining tables. Paul Sellers convinced me that quiet work is better. Sharpening whetstone included. I will show you how to...
Turns out the same focus that ships a rendering engine also flattens a board.
€5 per_day
One hour on a video call. You show me your profiler output. I tell you what 30 lines to rewrite. Works for graphics, numerics, sim, game loops. Does NOT work for web backends -- that is a different sp...
The hot path is 3 percent of your code and 97 percent of your wall clock. Fix the 3 percent.
€50 per_session
Plano, TX, US
Exported from La Piazza · 2026-04-24