23 things from 2023 - Part 2: Learning & Discovery
This is part of my round up of 23 things from 2023. The index is here.
8. Interesting online communities
How do you stay up to date with the new developments and news in the industry as well as feeling part of a community?
Unity’s internal Slack server is a vibrant place, with a lot of interesting discussion – but its focus is of course our work at Unity – so I find it beneficial to be part of other communities to get a sense of what’s happening in the wider world.
I’ve tried a few Discord servers, but I find them too distracting. TwiXXer increasingly shows me people I don’t follow making bold statements that I don’t agree with. LinkedIn is ok, but often what’s shared is more promotional than useful and truly interesting.
In the end I’ve settled on some industry-only, invite-only places (signal to noise ratio): a couple of Slack servers (UK Games Industry + Games Tech) and old forums like TheChaosEngine which provide with me with some exceptionally good discussion.
9. Jendrik’s Graphics Programming Weekly
Realtime graphics remains an exciting and ever progressing field. There’s so much happening that it takes effort to stay abreast of what’s going on, what new papers are hot, which games are using which technique and so on.
Wouldn’t be good if somebody curated a nice list of interesting graphics happenings for us?
Thankfully Jendrik Illner has! His weekly newsletter (also available via email) is super useful: https://www.jendrikillner.com/tags/weekly/
10. Google Codelabs
In 2023 I wanted to learn some Flutter. After wasting time going through some badly written tutorials and very out of date discussion, I discovered that Google have their own learning portal, that’s full of great content covering their key technologies: https://codelabs.developers.google.com
11. SoundCloud Daily Drops
I like to listen to house and techno DJ mixes while I’m working, and I love discovering new music. So much new music is being released that finding good stuff can be really time consuming (a bit like the process of finding interesting graphics papers).
There are curated sites like https://5mag.net/ out there, which have a lot of great tunes, but they’re narrow and based on someone else’s tastes.
SoundCloud’s Machine Learning solution which takes my listening history and likeminded people’s listening preferences has yielded some great, now favourite mixes and tunes: https://help.soundcloud.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000099353-Daily-Drops-playlist