So beyond those two main pieces of advice, definitely,
in your own personal studies, and if you're taking classes in university,
try to tackle some difficult subjects involved in the core skills that you
would need to succeed on an engine team working on Triple-A games.
Things like low-level computer architecture,
being able to understand how a computer chip works on a very fundamental level so
that way you can write code that's optimized for it specifically.
Same thing with just learning about general C++ optimization strategies for
modern computers.
And another more recent one is multi-threaded programming is
becoming very very important to be able to thread your systems to run in
parallel across all of the cores on a CPU.
Additionally, it's very useful to be able to understand
each of the main components that makes up a game engine.
So that way,
whatever you get thrown at as a problem, you can work through it and figure it out.
A big thing is that if you can write your own toy engine in your spare time,
that's a huge boost to your knowledge about how all of these things will
fit together and work.
The other big piece of advice that I have is to get involved.
I mentioned I got involved in the student club at my university, I started doing
game jams, those were both excellent things that I did before I even really
started taking serious courses leading me down the path towards engine programming.
Another thing is I spent a lot of time on Twitter.
I started really trying to pay attention to what the experts in
my field were saying.
A lot of people like to tweet out advice of hey,
like this is a new paper that just came out.
Or like new blog posts on ideas or
just argue about even smaller things on optimization or features.
And once you start identifying these experts in the field, read their blogs,
start writing your own blogs.
I mention that's how Iron Galaxy found me to actually start my interview process.
And another thing is consider attending professional conferences.
Game Developer's Conference has lots of great content and so
does Siggraph for rendering.
And that can be expensive.
In college, I started spending a lot of time saving all of
my money that I could to make sure that I could afford to go to GDC each year.
But if that's not really feasible,
make sure you just pay attention to the Internet.
There's lots of slides and presentations that are available for
free after these finish.
For example, the advances in real time rendering
course from Siggraph always posts an extensive selection of slides and
course notes that are incredibly useful even if you didn't attend.