Thursday
Room 3
13:40 - 14:40
Session (60 min)
Programming like a neanderthal: Atari 2600 development
Remember when a single byte was a treasure, and a few kilobytes of memory felt like a luxury? Most of us don’t—but in the world of Atari 2600 development, this was the brutal reality. Creating games on this primitive hardware required an almost prehistoric level of ingenuity, where developers wrangled every cycle of the processor like hunters stalking mammoths. With just 128 bytes of RAM (yes, bytes), programming felt less like coding and more like chiseling gameplay onto the side of a cave wall.
Fast forward to 2024, and we live in a world of multi-core processors, terabytes of memory, and frameworks so forgiving that even a monkey could make a halfway decent app. While these advances have made our lives easier, have they also dulled the edge of our technical creativity? Are we living large on the riches of modern tooling while forgetting the hard-fought lessons of the past?
In this fun and nostalgic talk, we’ll explore what the gritty, resource-constrained programming of the Atari 2600 can teach us about creativity, discipline, and the raw joy of solving problems with just enough. Along the way, we’ll examine whether our modern conveniences might actually make us a bit... lazy. After all, even Neanderthals built fire—can we say the same about our build pipelines without a CI tool?
Cristian Prieto
A distributed database software engineer based in Berlin, Germany, with extensive experience across various domains, including distributed systems and databases, operating system kernel drivers, mobile applications, and web development. He is currently a distributed query engine engineer and is passionate about system internals, and open-source projects. Beyond his professional interests, Cristian enjoys history and has a fondness for cats. He loves to explain complex things in a funny, casual way and to share his passion about system engineering with the world.