[Thread] I get asked very often how can I be able to work on so many low level areas effortlessly in Godot, like rendering, physics, audio DSP, UI toolkits, scripting languages, networking, IO, pathfinding, platform porting, etc. and still do it efficiently.
The thing is, I just consider myself a generalist and I firmly believe that the "Jack of all trades master of none" label that we generalists are despectively labelled with is bullshit. Additionally, you don't need to master something in order to be very proficient with it.
There is a lot in the "knowledge surface" of things that is useless. I don't always do through research on topics before diving into them. I just look at what is available and try to see what is of use for my goals. Learning without goals is difficult and confusing for me anyway
Lack of knowledge of the full picture can sometimes lead you to make mistakes, of course, but learning from those mistakes is also very valuable. Eventually, soon or late, the full picture forms anyway and you will understand those topics even better thanks to your experience.
Of course, motivation, perseverance and patience are also key. It's normal to first panic when you don't understand something, but you need to keep trying different attack angles at the problem until, eventually, it starts to break and make sense.
Then, why is it so rare for people to be generalists and specialize in several fields? I can't say for certain but I have my own theory:
Generalists are rare and even bullied in a lot of work cultures. Normally, we are "the trustworthy people who can solve all the problems we are thrown at", but we are also difficult to categorize and not specializing at only one area often gives us less credibility and authority.
This results in a lot of generalists having impostor syndrome, because even though they can be very good at multiple areas, most people don't consider this to be possible, so they accept that belief too and focus only in one.
So we often end up doing a great job in management positions and being praised for our communication skills (well, we can talk to everyone in their language), but are rarely recognized for our technical skill.
But in my case, though, I didn't know that because 20 years ago, when I was young (I am a South American) there was no gamedev jobs or even companies here. I loved games and wanted to work on this field, so the only way for to do it was to help create an industry from scratch.
Unlike today, technology was incredibly expensive, so I created everything from scratch for my companies and later for other companies here in order to make complex games. There was no difference for me in working on rendering, physics, scripting or UI. Everything was gamedev.
Had I been born in the US, France or Japan, I may have ended up working on EA, Ubi or Nintendo, and specializing in something. I'm not even an exception, Cocos2D is also from my country and so is one of the main contributors of Ogre3D. The situation led us to this.
So I hope this sheds a bit of light of why some people like me exists and why it's not as common. I don't think I'm very smart or special (specially when I compare to other Godot contributors who I believe are true geniuses), but it's just that the world is not normally for us.
