By Gergely Orosz, the author of The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter and Building Mobile Apps at Scale
Navigating senior, tech lead, staff and principal positions at tech companies and startups. An Amazon #1 Best Seller. New: the hardcover is out! As is the audibook. Now available in 6 languages.
So, what are people searching for when they look for ?
If you want a "New" experience, download the latest fan patch (v3.5 as of late 2024). If you want "Gold" quality, play the LCS Map Swap on a real PSP-3000 with a Glass Screen Protector and a extended battery pack.
For nearly two decades, a phantom has haunted the world of mobile gaming. It’s whispered about in dusty forum threads, debated in YouTube comment sections, and sought after by the most die-hard collectors. That phantom is the possibility of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on a PlayStation Portable (PSP) in a definitive, uncut, "Gold" edition format.
Let’s break down everything you need to know about this elusive concept, why it matters in 2024, and how to get the definitive "Gold" San Andreas experience on a PSP today. First, the hard truth. Rockstar Games never officially released Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas for the PlayStation Portable.
The phrase refers to the – specifically, the fan-made port using the VitaGL libraries (usually played on a PS Vita) or the extremely limited PSP Lua demakes. The "Gold" and "New" tags usually indicate a specific fan-made repack: usually a stripped-down map, swapped audio, or a texture pack meant to make the game run at a stable frame rate. The Reality: The "PSP Port" Explained Around 2019, developer TheFlow released a proof-of-concept using an Android debug build of San Andreas to run on the PS Vita (backwards compatibility mode). For the original PSP-1000, 2000, 3000, and Go, the situation is different.
9/10 for nostalgia. 4/10 for official legitimacy. 10/10 for modding creativity.
When the PSP was in its prime (2005–2010), Rockstar released two exclusive masterpieces: Liberty City Stories (2005) and Vice City Stories (2006). These were built specifically for the PSP’s 333MHz processor and 32MB of RAM. San Andreas , however, with its three entire cities (Los Santos, San Fierro, Las Venturas), countryside, desert, and forest, was simply too massive and too complex to port to the PSP hardware officially.
The book is separated into six standalone parts, each part covering several chapters:
Parts 1 and 6 apply to all engineering levels: from entry-level software developers to principal or above engineers. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 cover increasingly senior engineering levels. These four parts group topics in chapters – such as ones on software engineering, collaboration, getting things done, and so on.
This book is more of a reference book that you can refer back to, as you grow in your career. I suggest skimming over the career levels and chapters that you are familiar with, and focus reading on topics you struggle with, or career levels where you are aiming to get to. Keep in mind that expectations can vary greatly between companies.
In this book, I’ve aimed to align the topics and leveling definitions closer to what is typical at Big Tech and scaleups: but you might find some of the topics relevant for lower career levels in later chapters. For example, we cover logging, montiroing and oncall in Part 5: “Reliable software systems” in-depth: but it’s useful – and oftentimes necessary! – to know about these practices below the staff engineer levels.
The Software Engineer's Guidebook is available in multiple languages:
You should now be able to ask your local book shops to order the book for you via Ingram Spark Print-on-demand - using the ISBN code 9789083381824. I'm also working on making the paperback more accessible in additional regions, including translated versions. Please share details here if you're unable to get the book in your country and I'll aim to remedy the situation.
I'd like to think so! The book can help you get ideas on how to help software engineers on your team grow. And if you are a hands-on engineering manager (which I hope you might be!) then you can apply the topics yourself! I wrote more about staying hands-on as an engineering manager or lead in The Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter.
I've gotten this variation of a question from Data Engineers, ML Engineers, designers and SREs. See the more detailed table of contents and the "Look inside" sample to get a better idea of the contents of the book. I have written this book with software engineers as the target group, and the bulk of the book applies for them. Part 1 is more generally applicable career advice: but that's still smaller subset of the book.