Ireland’s Diarmuid Early wins world Microsoft Excel title

I wish more programmers would pay attention to how productive power users in different can be with their tools. Look at CAD competitions. I wonder if there are video editting competitions?

The Oscars, The Golden Globes, the Emmys, just a few!

You never get to see the action there. Just the finished product.

I think this may actually be two different things. Much like how being good at coding doesn’t mean it’s fun to watch you code. Though there are “performance” coders where it really is!

Programming efficiency isn’t about typing/editing fast - it’s about great decision-making. Although I have seen the combo of both working out very well.

If you focus on fast typing/editing skills to level up, but still have bad decision-making skills, you'll just end up burying yourself (and possibly your team) faster and more decisively. (I have seen that, too.)

I used to work as technical director for a touring live graphic design, 3D modeling, and animation tournament. It was kind of like iron chef for designers. They worked live in timed rounds with their screens projected overhead. It was sponsored by Adobe, Autodesk, and Wacom. It was pretty impressive to see how power users did their thing for sure.

Although they do have a category for best editing, it's hard to call it an award for "best film editor" when it doesn't control for the overall quality of the film. For example, with the Oscars, it's extremely common (2/3 of the time) for a film that wins best picture to also win best editing.

I wonder how you could construct a reasonably controlled competition for film editing.

The person you replied to stated:

> how productive power users in different [fields] can be with their tools

There are a lot more tools in programming than your text editor. Linters, debuggers, AI assistants, version control, continuous integration, etc.

I personally know I'm terrible at using debuggers. Is this a shortcoming of mine? Probably. But I also feel debuggers could be a lot, lot better than they are right now.

I think for a lot of us reflecting at our workflow and seeing things we do that could be done more efficiently with better (usage of) tooling could pay off.

I interpreted the original comment totally differently - I thought they were saying that the programmers [who created these tools] should pay more attention to how productive [or not] power users can be with the tools [that they created]. And use that as an important metric for software quality. Which I definitely agree with.

Perhaps that’s because Best Picture isn’t controlling for the effect that good editing has on the film.

Or any users for that matter. The familiar "I can't see how anybody can stand to use Excel" is too widespread to be dismissed as a fluke.

Drop 10 hours of footage to the competitors on day 0, assign judges random groups of completed films on day N.

Maybe let each editor request one reshoot in the first week, a committee aggregates similar requests, all editors get all the reshoots once they're finalized.

Maybe include storyboards and a rubrik for what story the film is supposed to share and how we're meant to feel, but maybe not.

There is a head to head CAD guy on Youtube. I wish I could remember his name, I’ll look it up and update this post.

> wonder if there are video editting competitions?

Yes - but they've turned into something I'd really rather not watch: https://www.opus.pro/agent/human-creator-vs-ai

In high school, I participated in a STEM-based competition. There were a ton of categories like CO2 dragsters (my favorite), architecture, 2D and 3D CAD, GIS, and numerous others I can't remember. Some categories had more of a business focus but most were science/engineering related. The 3D CAD one was pretty fun. I recall two parts. In the first half, you got a hand-drawn sketch of a bushing and had to recreate it in Autodesk Inventor as fast as possible and then generate a 2D drawing properly dimensioned (like what you'd hand to a machinist). The second half involved creating all of the parts for a basic ceiling fan and then making an animated exploded view that also spun the fan. I was really good at that stuff back then but I definitely wasn't the quickest. I'm sure it's a lot different now, so much of CAD now involved CNC and 3D printing that's there's probably aspects that include messing with gcode now.

My GIS competition was fun too. They gave me a bunch of map data and I had to produce a report on Washington DC storm surge flood zones and potential rescue helicopter locations all within a couple hours.

I recall there being a video production category too. I didn't compete in it but you'd be given props and dialogue to turn into a video over the course of a day or two. Very few of the categories were contemporaneous competitions, most were long term project presentations.

Hi! Do you remember the name of that competition? Super interested in that.

I've seen your work at Hard Work Party before, by the way! Really cool stuff, glad to see you've also got the startup going as well.

These reward the artistry of the output of the edits, not the productivity of the editors.

Thanks! It was called Cut&Paste