I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster. (I have seen that, too.)
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 10x millions worth of exposure.
There is also the mocumentary flick of the Excel eTournament scene with "Makro"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xubbVvKbUfY
Don’t forget part two
https://youtu.be/ICp2-EUKQAI
Life imitates art.
This is too good.
Not unlikely it inspired the whole pro excel scene to exist.
I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?
I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.
The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!
Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.
I wonder how you could construct a reasonably controlled competition for film editing.
You never get to see the action there. Just the finished product.
I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!
Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.
If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster. (I have seen that, too.)
I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.
The person you replied to stated:
> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools
There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.
I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.
I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.
That's sort of fair.
Yes, you can construct a benchmark for measuring how time-efficient a programmer is to do something well-defined using different kinds of tooling.
Still, I kind of doubt the meaningfulness of this.
I could do half-screen nested array formulas when Excel was before the ribbon (and screen resolutions were smaller), out of necessity and because I could. It was in quite demanding uni home calculations and then mostly when working as intern in IB. But then having a life is also important...
The only thing I still enjoy is that any data smaller than 1M rows is sliced and diced almost without thinking. I am sometimes really grateful that MS did not break the shortcuts, while almost breaking the product overall. The muscle memory works perfectly.
I don’t understand how a Microsoft team that respects its customers (and maintains shortcuts) can co-exist in an org that sees their customer as marks.
It's almost as though organizations are made of human beings who have complicated relationships, differing opinions, and nuanced thinking.
Possibly messing with the guys who handle the money make for the loudest complaints
I had a negative view of MS when I was young. Then I got jobs at large orgs managing IT for 1000s of people. I don't know how else you'd do it without the Microsoft stack. I'm not saying you can't, but good luck managing whatever custom ball of knots you manage to come up with and also finding people to work on it for you. If you think open office and some kind of custom IAM solution will work, you just don't have the experience to have an opinion on it, IMHO.
It's interesting that the challenges are not business or accounting centred, as is the expectation when using Excel. If this is now general problem solving, are we watching language-specific competitive programming through the lens of a more broadly accessible platform like MS Excel?
I enjoy the idea, and love watching it grow.
It used to be financial modeling but they realized they’d get more attention with the esports audience this way.
It’s gone quite far now - one of the many challenges was a mock terrain map where you’d calculate distances to hike while considering the weight of your pack. Even the way they walk through the tunnel is done for show.
Excel is a general purpose computing environment and has been for quite some time.
When I was in the air force we had a complete aircraft maintenance planning and performance management system entirely in Excel. It can connect to remote workbooks on a shared drive/SharePoint too, so the higher headquarters would tie into our dashboard for their own operational readiness tracking.
It was a total shit show of undocumented pseudo APIs with zero change management or version control but it worked somehow.
Should be 'Michael Jordan of spreadsheets'
The Spiderman would be better. If anyone used formulas' precedents/dependents that would be instantly visual.
Did he retired spreadsheets to become a professional baseball player?
The descriptions of the problems make it sound a little like algorithmic puzzles but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language… Excel is pretty amazing in what you can do; I’ve regretted having to use Google Sheets for the last few years.
> but your only tool is Excel instead of some programming language
There is little difference between (if (> a b) c d) and =IF((A1 > B1), C1, D1)
Excel is the most widely installed functional programming language IDE.
Change the language of your Windows system to anything but English and then open your Excel file with formulas again.
I don't get your point
programming languages aren't allowed to be in non-english somehow?
ok, what happens? (I'm not messing around on my system right now ...)
Localization of formulas. On my system, all parameter-separating commas have to be replaced with semicolons.
Yup. Not too long ago they added Python scripting. Definitely beats the weird cloud scripting you have to do with Google Sheets.
Excel Python runs in the cloud. It is nicely integrated though.
Looks a bit like vimgolfing [0]
[0] https://www.vimgolf.com/
Any link to the problems that were being solved?
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
Obligatory Krazam sketch: https://youtu.be/xubbVvKbUfY?si=h6QR2gzac48R6kca
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
https://fmworldcup.com/
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
Does Microsoft gain useful information about product UX from this? Wondering if any Excel PMs watch this and see where micro-optimizations are made.
Excel was completed at least a decade ago (probably two).
This is obviously 99% marketing. Microsoft/Waggener Edstrom tend to be really good at getting mainstream media to report on the marketing activities.
Example: For many Windows launches since Windows 3/95, there's been this media splash where Microsoft spends x million dollars on marketing and mainstream media then reports this, thereby getting (like) 10x millions worth of exposure.
You know what they say about the Irish and spreadsheets…
Come Feel The Heat With These Great Feats of Spreadsheets lol
Edit: Of course, they changed the title! [1]
[1] https://share.google/qJYSGYMKihkjh7bql