You can prematurely optimize maintainability, flexibility, security, and robustness just like you can performance.

One of the big lessons of a big project is you don't want people that aren't really programmers programming, you'll suffer for it!

The Escalation programmers come from a completely different background, and the codebase is all STL this, boost that, fill-up-the-property list, dispatch the event, and delegate that. I had been harboring some suspicions that our big codebases might benefit from the application of some more of the various “modern” C++ design patterns, despite seeing other large game codebases suffer under them. I have since recanted that suspicion.

It is not that uncommon for the cost of an abstraction to outweigh the benefit it delivers. Kill one today!

Focused, hard work is the real key to success.

An interesting question: is it easier to motivate a learned individual that never does anything, or educate an ignorant individual that actually produces things?

Programming in the abstract sense is what I really enjoy. I enjoy lots of different areas of it... I'm taking a great deal of enjoyment writing device drivers for Linux. I could also be having a good time writing a database manager or something because there are always interesting problems.