We're Stephanie Hurlburt and Rich Geldreich, ask us anything!
We own a company called Binomial and we make a texture compression product called Basis. Textures take up most of a game's data, so if you reduce the size of your textures, you're going to improve performance in your game as well as reduce download sizes/times. The product has gained great interest across the industry and we actively collaborate with the Khronos Group to make sure our file format is also an industry standard.
Before working on Basis, we did consulting under Binomial and we both worked in the game industry before that. Through Binomial we helped optimize VR demos, most notably under Intel's Project Alloy headset. Before that, Rich worked at Microsoft and Valve on game titles like Age of Empires 3, Portal 2, DotA 2, and Halo Wars. Stephanie worked on VR demos at Oculus and on graphics optimization at Unity.
Latest comments (74)
HI! Two questions: (1) What are some essential skills I need to develop in order to work remotely? (2) I've never enjoyed programming, but it seems to be the only way I will be able to get a work visa abroad to move to Canada or Germany (my third world nationality has been a bane since the day I was born, along with the terrible education I had), I don't enjoy front-end development but love designing and storytelling, currently I'm taking a VR nanodegree at Udacity, but I often think about whether I'm focusing on the right things... Any recommendations or thoughts? Should I focus on more practical skills like data analysis or rails dev despite not enjoying it much? Much love and thank you for doing this!
1) Working remotely doesn't really require different skills. I think the key is just working extra hard on finding those jobs and building up a good online presence to attract employers. Get a good website built, search for the job postings, network, etc.
2) You can get a job in all kinds of programming fields, it's really hard to say "Study this and not that for a job." I would be active in a lot of online communities and do a serious job search now and make yourself a list of remote jobs you'd want. Then try to talk to someone at one of those companies or in related fields, and ask them what skills they'd like to see. You can find some mentors here: stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/11... . Make that list of jobs and reach out to related mentors to see what skills you need to build up.
Thank you for taking the time to read this and answer! IT REALLY MEANS A LOT!
Curious to the story behind naming your team 'Binomial' (as I'm a maths lecturer and coding hobbyist).
Stephanie and I were sitting around in a cafe in U District, trying to think of a company name. Stephanie had a bunch of college-level math books, so I looked through the index of each one and read out loud anything that sounded remotely interesting.
We choose Binomial because we're a two person company and it implied "two", and because it sounded cool to us. Our product Basis also involves a lot of linear algebra and optimization algorithms, so we wanted to choose something mathematical.
Are you collaborating with AMD Radeon in any way? I saw you at this year's Capsaicin event in March. AMD's Vega architecture also has a form of texture compression tech called HBCC (High Bandwidth Cache Controller). Does basis have anything in common with that? P.S when can we expect this tool to be released?
Basis is already ready to be licensed to companies, folks can contact us at info@binomial.info for that.
In terms of releasing a public spec, no dates yet but we are definitely working on it.
In terms of AMD, I can't speak publicly about any agreements with them, but I can say that a goal of ours is to get Basis in GPU hardware and that's a big reason we're working with the Khronos Group.
I'm sure the two of you had low paying jobs at some point in your lives. How did It feel to have your first big developer pay check? Was it a stress reliever or was it no big deal? As a junior developer, I don't make close to what the average developer makes, but I love my job and view each day as an opportunity to get better. But I'm very much looking forward to the pay that being a developer can bring.
For me, I worked minimum wage jobs for many years. Even as I went to school for programming, I was kind of envisioning maybe needing to stay in retail if it didn't work out.
In my first coding job, I made $42,000. Holy crap, I remember that felt like an amazing amount of money. I suddenly didn't need to agonize about grocery bills. It was life changing.
For a while, I didn't feel comfortable negotiating salary because I had this complex of "I should be grateful" and I also just wasn't very aware of what other programmers made at all. I thought maybe this was pretty normal.
But then I ran into a situation, later in my career, where a coworker who did the same work I was doing and had the same experience was making twice what I was. That did not feel right at all. It was a very strong lesson on how quickly you can advance as a programmer in terms of salary, and also taught me that negotiation and getting other offers is important.
I once worked at a local newspaper, operating the machine that inserted ads into papers. I also worked at a bakery, washing dishes and cleaning up.
My first real game job was as a C programmer working on a 3D PC game named Montezuma's Return. I made $1500/month as a contractor in 1996, which seemed like a lot of money to me at the time (as a 19 year old). From there my pay skyrocketed as I shipped more games and got more experience.
Was making a lot of money a stress reliever? Not really. My best paying gig (at Valve) was exceptionally stressful. I made like 1/3rd as much at Microsoft (at Ensemble Studios) but I was much happier and totally less stressed out. I think optimizing for a balance between income, happiness, and low stress is a lot healthier vs. just optimizing for highest income.
What would you say were your personal learning steps to get where you are today? As someone who has recently begun coding I am continually learning new things each day but sometimes it feels like I'm moving sideways rather than progressing. Would you recommend continuing to expand on new things or try and focus on a specific area?
For me, programming began as "I need a job and money." I didn't do it as a hobby, I didn't know the slightest thing about programming until I took college courses with the intent of getting a job.
So I went through college, and then my learning has largely been the intersection of "what I've liked that I've done so far" and "what can I get paid to do." Even into starting a business-- we weren't just going to make any product because we thought it was fun and we assumed it'd sell, we made a project we knew we already had customers for.
I recommend trying to find a mentor if you can (lots of resources here: stephaniehurlburt.com/blog/2016/11... ) and try to learn what you need to get a job, or if you have a job learn what you need to excel. Totally fine to do things just for the joy of it too, but this approach has worked well to give me structure (I tend to love a lot of things :) ).
Was thinking more on this-- if you feel like your professional development's totally fine and you just want to progress in other ways, maybe another good way to structure it is to set other goals, and aim for those ideally with some guided help. Same basic idea.
As a kid I played with 8-bit computers way too much. I basically just read a lot, studied a bunch of programs, and messed around. I had a lot of fun programming in BASIC and 6809 assembler.
Anyhow, I would recommend that you continue experimenting with different things until you find something that you find particularly interesting or fun. Then try focusing on that.
How to stay focused & productive while working from home?
We have a "work area" of the house-- a place that's only for work. And we don't work in other areas. Sometimes I like to work in coffee shops too.
I think the key is associating a place with getting things done, and associating everywhere else with nothing to do with work. Building up a routine really helps, having goals every day helps. And we don't have kids or roommates/other family members around, but if we did I imagine finding an uninterrupted space helps too (I know folks who purposefully get a coworking space or always work in coffee shops, for example).
Having a 'no work' zone in my house has been SO helpful.
Stephanie - I'm curious about your education/employment timeline. Things like what type of jobs you had after secondary school, internships, first job after university, jobs you wouldn't put on your CV, etc. For example, did you go straight from secondary school into college, or was there work in between?
It's easy to look at you and see someone who's successful, but it's much harder to not assume all kinds of things about the path to that success. I thought sharing some of the actual path might make it harder for myself and other to write off your success as 'I could never do that.' If any of that is too personal, feel free to disregard.
Rich - IIRC you were involved with (responsible for?) getting Steam running on Linux. Just curious as to how long that took, what the process was like, what kind of problems you ran into, tools you used, new things you had to learn, etc. Of course I can't remember where I heard that so, if that's not the case hit me with your best math joke. Here's mine.
What did the Zero say to the Eight?
Nice Belt.
Thank you both.
Hey!
So after high school, I worked lots of jobs throughout college. For my last couple years I needed to totally support myself and my partner who didn't work, so it was necessary to work a whole lot while also going to school. In college I worked as a tour guide, in the admissions office, as the business manager of the school newspaper, in the grants office, as a telemarketer. Then I dropped out of school. I worked at a coffee shop and as a sales associate at a clothing store. Then I went back to school in computer science, and kept supporting myself as a sales lead at that clothing store. Lots of jobs, often multiple held at the same time or overlapping each other.
In terms of programming jobs, after I graduated college I worked at a small advertising/design shop right out of college, then at Unity, then as a contractor at Oculus, then started Binomial with Rich!
Hi Tim - Yes, I was one of the earliest members of the Steam Linux project. I was involved in the project for about 2+ years. I worked with all the major driver vendors to get OpenGL performance up to where it needed to be to have a hope of being a viable alternative to Direct3D.
I helped port and spent a lot of time optimizing many of Valve's Source1 engine games (such as L4D2, DotA2, CS:GO) to Linux, and I took the "togl" D3D9->GL layer and basically rewrote it to eventually outperform Direct3D. Getting the GL drivers in shape while also trying to navigate and survive the sometimes vicious backroom politics and yearly-firing cycles at Valve was very trick business.
While working on this project, I had one driver vendor snipe at me personally (with a patent attack on one of my open source libs), because I basically treated all driver vendors equally. This driver vendor basically infected Valve's Linux team with a couple of their hand-picked "embedded" engineers, which gave them certain advantages vs. the other vendors.
Tool wise, I used AMD's GPU PerfStudio, RAD's Telemetry, and a few in-engine ad-hoc custom profiling tools I created specifically to compare GL's batch performance vs. D3D9's. At the time, the available GL tools were almost useless for real-world work.
I had to learn a lot about Linux, OpenGL, and how the Source1 engine worked. I spent a ton of time debugging Source1 engine bugs.
I also spent some time porting Source2 to OpenGL, by wiring up the rendersystem D3D9 backend to togl, then optimizing it as a unit. I wrote the first working GL backend for Source2 and handed it off to another external engineer.
All in all, I had a lot of fun working on the project. Next time, I'll drink less caffeine and do it in a more supportive atmosphere.
What do the next 5 years in your industry look like?
That's a big question! In the texture compression space we're in specifically, our goal is to get Basis as the industry standard and to completely abstract away existing GPU compression formats. We want to get Basis into hardware and browsers and improve compression for everyone.
In my situation, my anxiety largely comes from PTSD. I got out of a traumatic situation a while ago and have been recovering.
The first step for me was getting a therapist, definitely. It helps so much. I went to PsychologyToday's website to find one. Try to get someone who specializes in the experiences and issues you deal with-- there are filters on that search. If you're worried about money, many therapists have sliding scales-- just ask about them, or ask if they can refer you to one who does do a sliding scale.
A big thing that's helped me is simply being more accepting of my anxiety. I definitely have this attitude I tell myself of "Suck it up," "This shouldn't be a big deal," "Just move on"-- or worse, I get really angry and frustrated with myself and very self-hating. All to try to move on to anxiety! Turns out that kind of negative attitude amplifies anxiety like crazy. Being loving with myself, giving myself days where it's okay not to do anything, really trying to find out what my body needs, making sense of why I feel this way and telling myself it makes sense-- that all helps so much.
It's also helped me to realize the source of the anxiety, and understand that source fully. PTSD is a brain injury (at least many therapists believe this). My brain was injured because of trauma. It will heal. It doesn't have to hurt like this forever. Get blood, urine, saliva tests to see if there's anything that got disrupted in your body-- in my case, the PTSD actually hurt my thyroid, so taking medicine to heal that part of my body has been really important to healing.
Make sure you're eating well and sleeping well. I can't state this enough. Your body is so important, and if you aren't taking care of it, of course you'll feel bad. Eat enough vegetables and protein. Create nightly routines so you can sleep better. No looking at your phone after a certain time at night. Stuff like this.
Meditation can be extremely powerful too.
Also, be accepting if you have to rest, but try not to have "zero" days. Do at least one thing you need to do every day, and congratulate and reward yourself when you do it. Over time, it gets easier to do more and more.
If it's still really tough, I recommend seeing a naturopathic doctor and not only an MD. They tend to take a more holistic approach to healing and can give you gentler solutions.
Take it easy on yourself and let your body heal. I wish you the best. <3
Some books you may want to check out:
"The Chemistry of Calm":
amazon.com/Chemistry-Calm-Powerful...
"Depression Free Naturally":
amazon.com/Depression-Free-Natural...
Thanks for these.