His severe OCD is a double-edged sword.

Despite the stereotypes and their disposition to it, sperg lords actually write horrible code. They have no sense of style, brevity, or organization, and constantly reinvent the wheel.

This guy can't get a job coding for a reason, and it aint his personality.

This is true. Asperger-Americans are much better suited to testing and debugging.

Coding for a company would be a bad idea, but I would like to see Ulillillia be able to support himself as an indie game designer. It won't happen, since Platform Masters is a study in the very problems that theSnake mentioned, but maybe if he got someone else to handle the distribution and the marketing? Platform Masters looks at least as polished as Starbound will ever be; there's no reason a friend of his couldn't convince him to put the current build on sale as a hip indie Alpha.

Platform Masters could easily make him money. It's a "novelty game" and I'm sure people would love to try it out.
Hmmm.... Maybe poetv should sponsor a kickstarter.

I would totally be down for that. Does anyone here correspond with U-dogg? If so, shoot him an email and see if he'd mind if we got him a Kickstarter.

Yes, from the looks of it he has most of the source code for PM in a single behemoth file

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/rock-simulator-2014#home

The Pet Rock ...LIVES!

What little code he's shown on his channel is pretty terrible, yeah. Whenever he talks about his code and pronounces system calls in very "quaint" ways it belies the underlying lack of understanding in what's going on. He also has a tendency to modify his code and recompile/rerun instead of just making a command-line parameter, and often when he talks about what he did it demonstrates a lack of understanding in what he's actually doing.

There is nothing wrong with coding for fun, of course, and if that's what gives him pleasure, more power to him. But as someone who actually has to work with other peoples' code, I'd really rather not be in a position where I have to mentor him, because his path has diverged pretty severely from that of a productive software engineer.

Someday I would love an opportunity to give him a technical screening, though, just to see how his mind works.

There are some things he seems to do well, and others not so much. I remember when he was making some sort of height mapping system for his backgrounds he realized the difference between the highest and lowest points he wanted was too big to fit in one byte, so he made each pixel represent the DIFFERENCE between it and the ones surrounding it instead. It was actually a pretty cool solution.
Also, in his most recent Platform Masters video he realized that making all of the trees by hand was unreasonable so he came up with a way to automate it. These are good programmer hallmarks.

His real issue is that he over engineers everything. Programming in the real world involves making an impact quickly. Sometimes you need to know when to do things the 'bad' way in order to be a good developer.

Platform masters has been in development for like what, a decade? And he expects it to take like 4 more years. This is why he will never directly make money off of PM. It will likely never be finished.

I have a good friend who reminds me of Uli quite a lot. They've both been working on programming computer games for years at a time. After an initial burst of intense work, lasting a few weeks, he gets a little something showing on the screen and then makes no progress for months. He spends no real time learning fundamental concepts, just plowing ahead with doing things in whatever way he makes up as he goes along. And gets side tracked, writing all kinds of shit from scratch (actually wasting years of his time on tooling and game engines and whatnot, all of which you can buy cheaply or even for free).

Both are seeming the kindest & most sensitive people you will meet.

Yes but don't forget that he deducted penalties for things like calling into the office to find out what he had to do.

Why don't you do him on black velvet, what with those big eyes and all?

If I knew how to work with black velvet, oh fuck yeah!

It's weird, because as I was studying his face, it struck me that he looks very much like a doughy Fabio.