This goes far beyond designers. If you can't sell your work, you're in a dead end career. Full stop. Not just to customers, though that helps, no. The number of developers I know who are stuck in their career because they've never learned to sell their work within the organization is staggering. It's easily one of the two biggest things between senior developers and staff developers (the other being focus). The myth that great work sells it self needs to be seen for just that, a myth. Mike's here to help you with that.
Also, this talk is wonderful. It leans heavily on the old school preaching rhetoric. It's entirely captivating when done right. Once you've sat through this lecture to learn the material, sit through it again and take notes on the style. See what you can incorporate in your own speeches to take them to the next level.
We need so much more of this in software development. The practice of just telling people to use some library or other has hurt the field so much. You reinvent the wheel to learn how the wheel works, to improve the wheel, to design a wheel that works bettor for the problem you're actually working on, to apply lessons learned on different problems and cross pollinate innovations. Don't reinvent the wheel is probably the single least self-aware statement in history. The wheel is probably the single most reinvented piece of technology humans have ever used.
In any case, this is an excellent introduction to writing your own sound system. The downside is that every operating system has their own audio system, and the largest ones have nearly half a dozen different audio systems each. The one thing the libraries can do for you is try to cover over all the different audio systems. The problem is that not knowing how they work under the hood leaves your knowledge hallow. So study up. Write to them directly. Learn their idiosyncrasies. There's great insights on trade-offs is there.
By vehicle he means car, but the idea that there's limits to how much you can simulate in realtime for a game is absolutely true. Love that he shares a great base model for a vehicle though. A fantastic resource for anyone starting on a car in games. You'll have to play around with the feel until you get something better for your game, but a good starting point to understand the basics none the less.
