Factorio teaches you software engineering, seriously. 

Man this is the best fking community ever, ya'll are too nice and so freaking wholesome

Being a software engineer turned me into a Factorio Player

Playing factorio gave me the idea of pursuing software engineering. After 3 years as a Software engineer, I finally reached my goal, which is to get better at Factorio.

The new invention that blows my mind in this video is: a funny software engineer.

One thing that's worth noting: a lot of these shared terms actually come from a third, much older discipline called industrial engineering. Which is pretty much playing Factorio for real. Say you're running a textile business in the early industrial revolution. You work with linen, so you buy flax, you have to break it down into fibres, you have to spin those fibers into thread, you have to run that thread through a loom to make fabric, and you need to bundle that fabric up into bolts to be sold. And to make things complicated, you also make bedsheets and tablecloths, so you also do some sewing using thread and fabric to make your sheets and tablecloths. (No idea if these were available off the shelf in those days, I know clothing generally wasn't, but this is just to make a point. Ok, so you've got a facility that produces thread and fabric. How many spinning jennies do you need? How many powered looms? What kind of steam engine do you need to run all that? And because the steam engine is noisy and disrupts the people who are sewing your sheets and tablecloths, you have them in a different facility - how often do you need to cart a shipment from your textile factory to your sewing people. The only facility available for this was across town, did you decide to transport your stuff all the way across town, or just pay some folks living nearby to make product for you in their own homes? If you did the latter, how are you managing your deliveries of materials and picking up of product? These are literal business decisions that have had to be made pretty much since the advent of the factory in its earliest form, and have been studied by actual engineers for a similar length of time. I still have my notes from that class!

Factorio is like the best part of programming turned into game Which literally makes it a crack for engineers...

My mom really liked this video

Bro is so charismatic I only caught that he's wearing socks mid vid.

bro, the attention aid you added to the "Storytime" section unironically kept me engaged and listening to the entire story. Idk why I'm so impressed by this, but i am.

I'm a software engineer and you just convinced me to play factorio. Not even kidding

If you build city blocks, you’re heavily into object oriented languages. If you build main bus, you code procedurally. If you build spaghetti, you code in perl.

You scale your factory, at some point something stops working, you invent a new design, you scale futher, repeat. Just like in software engineering.

Stylistically....don't change a thing, I was absolutely hooked all the way through and LOVE this format. (Thank you for the "attention" videos during story time 6:24 ) As someone about to embark on their software engineering journey, I hope you continue to make this kind of content!

Okay so first, I learned what it's like to play Factorio with friends. Then I learned how NOT to play Factorio with friends (by learning what it's really like). But now I'm learning that playing Factorio will make me a software engineer? Incredible, this truly is one of the games of all time.

If you really want to understand the sickness that is factorio, one of the recent changelog notes for the game mentioned the need to up the max save file time played from 2 ish years because someone hit that number awhile back and overflowed some variables, causing their save game to essentially be paused. The devs then decided to do the logical thing and increase the possible save file time played to over 2 million years. The factory must grow.

I was confused when you told that story that I didn’t see the cutting soap video first. But when I saw it and red the subtitles I laughed SO HARD. You’re probably becoming one of those RU-vidrs who rarely upload but when you upload it’s something unique and a lot of fun to watch.

Can't wait for the next vid!!! Seriously I was enthralled for the entire video, you're such a good presenter.

Bros got some clean editing skills. This video must have taken forever.

My experience in Factorio has led me to a singular conclusion: I am not fit to be a software engineer.

In manufacturing: a bottleneck is a process that holds up production somewhere in the assembly line. Sometimes a bottleneck's root cause is due to a spaghetti-like flow of materials through the facility since the layout was planned beforehand for a smaller quantity throughput. We scale up or scale down by adding or removing machines, workers and materials. When scaling up, the load on parallel processes is balanced for a steady flow of materials, and we use logic controls with sensors set limits for detecting problems. Similar to tracing, we do a root cause analysis to figure out what's holding the whole thing up. Delays all depend on our upstream suppliers, and trickle down to our downstream customers.

Thank you for this. Obviously im addicted to Factorio and always felt so dumb when it comes to computers. Your casual approach to teaching is SO helpful when setting up an emotional openness to new knowledge. I understood ever part of this video and had a GREAT time watching it. Amazing job!

Imagine taking a Software Engineering class and the teacher just gives you a computer that has Factorio on it.

"I know that this is cringe" This is what RU-vid supposed to be. You making videos that you like and share it with others that also might like. Keep making videos man! I love the content!

This is amazingly put together, I was hooked all the way through!

I know I'm a bit late to this party, but I got words. As someone who knows basically nothing about software engineering or Factorio, this video made me want to get into both at the same time. I want to have the game open in one window and my IDE in another. You are a fantastic content creator; seriously. You have the relatability and charisma that is generally needed for this platform, as well as a knowledge of the subject matter that not only enables you to understand it, but to explain it to someone who hasn't been initiated to your field of knowledge. This stuff is golden, man. Please please please make more. I'm lovin' it. For some reason my username is defaulting to that auto-generated garbage. I don't know why.

I'm a med student who just started playing the game today while procrastinating studying for an exam on monday. I immediately began to compare it to the systems in biochemistry and physiology.

Train signals are probably a great way to talk about mutual exclusion and deadlocks when dealing with multi-threaded programs!

This video is put together so well that I'd be glad to watch another one

Dude this was excellent. I can clearly see all the parallels you draw here. You should definitely make the next one.

My love for factorio got me to start exploring software engineering at a really young age! I am now a psych major.

I'm so jealous there is a guy that has played Factorio 12k hours more than me

Definitely refreshing to watch a video like this again, I haven't seen your other videos but in my opinion it's a great balance of entertainment and knowledge/seriousness. It's a great style and format, especially when compared to some videos nowadays that are either too chaotic or too stretched out.😂

Thanks for making this video! Stupendous quality! So much so that I was surprised that it is among the first of your videos here on RU-vid. Keep up the great work!

Change NOTHING to this format, it's brilliant! The pacing, the jokes, the knowledge break-down, everything just right! *chef's kiss*

I came to learn a little about software engineering, I stayed to figure out who the hell has been talking to my mom on Facebook. This was highly entertaining, good work.

Very cool parallel, I think this is a great visual guide to better understand the basics the big concepts of software engineering. Kudos to you!

This was fun and entertaining. I really appreciate the comparisons and connections you made between the two. Nice work 😄

I was a video editor for 15 years. I have 600+ hours in Factorio. I am now a software developer. You are correct.

Not a cringe video. Really creative, I enjoyed the topic and the way you presented it. Pretty funny too! Good work.

Back in school, for my final science exam, i had a question on how a nuclear reactor works, I didnt study that part, I was an 8 mark question out of a 60 mark paper, I wrote down how a reactor works in factorio, I got 6 marks out of 8

I absolutely loved this video!!! Can only imagine how much time and effort went into it, but please make more you’re really great at articulating these concepts

God I would love to see someone put 4,000 hours of Factorio on their resume.

I'm a Software Engineer working as DevOps. I just noticed my last Factorio game is completely containerized and I made a Kubernetes control plane with train logic.

I fell in love within the first 10 seconds. Keep up the great work m'dude

Such a funny and insightful video! And I love that you just casually did it in your xmas socks!

I love how unhinged yet super solidly structured this video is As someone who loves factorio and also studies computer science, I relate to this and love this explanation

I'm a SE who was emotionally stunted by my parents in early childhood, and I need another video of you explaining how a monolithic program, relates to Factorio, and how they both enable you to talk to my mom.

Genuinely one of the most entertaining programming videos I’ve ever seen. Great points, great ideas too! This was the first video of yours I’ve seen and you earned my sub

you explained everything so well that everything seemed so obvious, so damn cool dude i loved your video!!

I’ve been trying to voice this to my friends for years that never give this game a shot. But I could not do it with this Intellectual prowess. Hopefully sharing this video with them will show them the magic for inspiration.

I had a kind of similar experience as a kid with the old Sierra citybuilder games like Pharaoh and Caesar 3. Only realized it after I studied software engineering for a couple of years. Parents, let your kids play.

It was a joyful experience when I played this game with my other fellow software-developers. We instinctively understood this game has so many commons with our actual work. We use various kind of developer's word like 'API', 'Maintainability', 'Scalability' or 'Optimization' so many times when we play. We talk to each other like, "Hey Jin, can you make iron plate API at that place? The input will be coal and iron ore, and the output should be 4-line convey of iron plate."

This was great. Would love to see you continue this type of education because it was entertaining and you're good at explaining things.

Excellent video, this was brilliant! One thing I’ve always noticed is when looking at CPU Architecture under a microscope, it looks like an extremely optimized and monumental Factorio plant. If in your next video you could include things like buses transporting data, smelters caching data, Assemblers being Logic, and so on it would make for a highly interesting video in my opinion. Great stuff!

Great expression of this analogy! Oh, and love the socks!

Great explanations with some good humor, really well put together. Really enjoyed watching this.

One of my former coworkers used his factorio game to get a job as a warehouse planner during his interview. As a player I would love to here your take on combinators and such. I find they frustrating at first but after a thousand hours, they are indispensable.

As a CS and IT person with a few decades of experience, your vid was accurate, insightful, fantastically presented and pretty damm funny. Whatever your 2nd topic is, DO IT. Enjoy your well earned and deserved new subscription.

the editing scaling intro was hilarious i love it great video so far

As a retired enterprise software engineer of 25+ years, I assure you that Factorio is far harder than software engineering.

Dude, your sense of humor and comedic timimg are incredible. I was laughing out loud so many times, even while enjoying and learning from your essay.

As someone who has spent of lot of time playing factorio and generally doesn't know what to do with their life this just motivated me to go down the route of software engineering, Thank you, can't wait to see the next video

You are really good at this video essay style video format. Good job, make more stuff!

This video is excellent, one of the most unique , oddly funny and surprisingly informative videos I've seen in a while. Love the humour and awkwardness. Keep it up bro

This video is a masterpiece of art. You have so completely compared the two subjects into identicality that it has bridged gaps that were already obvious into deep rooted bonds of nuance around each corner. Your shit was funny and engaging from the very first 15 seconds and you kept that energy going for the entire 21 minutes. Your channel is about to explode in popularity, I hope you're ready for it, because you just won the internet. I applaud you.

As a software engineer, I can confirm that I am the problem in both worlds.

I'm a software guy and I have a buddy who is interesting in the trade and always picking my brain on it. He sent me this video in his excitement of drawing parallels into what we do everyday into a game he knows fairly well. This effort to bridge technological patterns (in this case dev) with more widely familiar concepts such as gaming is great. I enjoyed your video and it was doubly good in that you made my friends brain tick just a bit faster. Really good job man.

This video is great, it's really entertaining and educational, the style and formatting of it was great to. I'm really excited for part 2

7:30ish in on readability: YES!.. Ive been saying this to agency after agency for years. Literally the milliseconds in performance you gain from making any maintained code less readable is just going to screw you later when that code needs to be updated bc now that everythings been oddly tucked together or just generally obfuscated in some way, you'll need to go back through all of this 'optimized' code and basically make it readable again just to complete the update. TIME WASTED in the end so.. learn to think ahead and always lean towards readable code!

I'm a graduate student, and I'm in the middle of writing a research proposal about using Factorio to teach Industrial Engineering. This video has brought up some perspectives i didn't consider. Thank you!

Please make another one. This was very entertaining and opened my eyes in a weird way.

You did phenomenal. I loved every part of it! If you made another video about the monolithic aspect the same way, it would be perfect!

As a super nerd that sucked at school, who is teaching myself software engineering to stop getting paid hourly as a onsite IT guy... This video was hilariously entertaining, and suprisingly educational. Please do more. You did a very good job at explaining these concepts, in an entertaining yet educational manner. Future content doesn't necessarily have to be a videogame analogy. I'd just love to hear you talk about comp sci concepts more. I feel like I'd pick up some good info whilst also being entertained. (I'm 22 btw, not a boomer, so like, I for real mean it lol. You caught my age group as an audience here)

Okay I cook for a ton of software engineers at “insert tech company here” and you just kinda made them seem so much more relatable. I have asked them what they do for work and for the life of me I couldn’t understand.

Glad theres still room on this app for a guy to make an absolute gem of a video and have it find its way through all of the algos and moderation into my feed

this is great. was so fun to watch, ty

I don’t code or play that game but sat through the whole video cuz I found it’s interesting and your presentation appealing. When I got to the end of the video and you were saying you were unsure if you’d make a the second video I thought to my self “well if I’m seeing this, it must have gotten a lot of views and gotten picked up by the algorithm” Lo and behold it’s got a half a million views. Good job 👍😮🎉

As a software engineer of more than 20 years and a factorio enjoyer, this was great. It's amazing how fitting the Factorio analogy is... The bigger your code base, the more and stronger, the bugs (biters) are that come attack your base, causing all kinds of other slow downs and interruptions. Also, if you want to have your mind blown, look up some of the older factorio vids where people build fully functional displays that actually encode/decode video and play it in game - Factorio is Turing Complete and an incredible video game.

What a great video! So fun and informative! Gratzzz!

Best video I have seen this year good job

I loved this format, please don't change it. You've blown me away with the quality that you put out compared to your subscriber count and the fact that I've never heard of you before. As someone who enjoys messing with and building programs for fun, I understood how much effort you put into making your analogies digestible by everyone. Watching this I got some junferno vibes but you seemed to keep this much calmer and focused which was a format that I loved as well. Please keep up the great videos and I'd love to see a second follow up video. I also plan to get into factorio as soon as I figure out how to not worry about that whole "eating and sleeping" thing.

As a software engineer, I don't know why I haven't known about factorio until just a month ago. I just fell in love almost immediately, to the point that I spent hours only in the tutorial, just to optimize everything before achieving the actual goal 😂It is the perfect game for the field because first and foremost, it is a game, so it washes the stress away. Second, I still use the same type of mental process when approaching a certain task. Planning and picturing how everything would run before placing all the components, making it more efficient and easier to upgrade later on. If I'm being honest here.. I feel like the game made me better at work. I think it has something to do with keeping the mental exercise going even at home playing a game. It makes me think like a software engineer without tiring or stressing me out like work does.

wow Tony, amazing video man, you put so much effort, really well doneeeee!!!

Ooh I adore your style and humor a lot. Was an amazing video to watch and as a person tutoring software engineering for bachelor students Its great how you could break down and convert those topics into examples of factorio or other analogy! Thanks a lot, you're great

4:30 as a person who doesn't know much about Pokemon and just started learning AWS i completely accepted those names 😂

Watching this, I was expecting some big youtuber, not 600 views. This video has quite an impressive quality, keep up the good work, I really hope you get the attention you deserve!

Thanks Tony, loved it, hope you make that sequel

i like the visualizations, i legit see this in my head all the time

A software engineer with charisma an actual humour. Jesus christ he's too powerful, someone stop him. Also, I can already tell by the format that tell you're wonderful. Never change.

I think you need more on the spaghetti. I think it's worth getting into maintenance and refactoring and the trade off between living with your past decisions, often by making the mess a lil worse or taking the time to do a big cleanup. And also how a layout that works fine for a small amount of things at a small scale just inevitably becomes a mess as you add to it.

AMAZING video! I especially loved that you put the "attention aide" in to help people (like me) not accidentally tune you out during your longer segmented story!!

A really interesting topic, would appreciate more videos about it.

In factorio I've really come to love the sorts of things I can do with trains, and I think it fits into the whole comparison with software engineering. Because when you first start with trains it tends to be really simple, you probably have a few dedicated trains going between specific stations, only going to and from the same spot each time, probably even on separate rail lines. Then as you learn how rail signals work you can combine things into one rail line with several different trains running on it, but each train is still just going between their normal spots. And THEN you start learning more advanced stuff, like how if you have two stations with the same name trains will be able to choose which one to go to, so instead of having "Iron Mine A", "Iron Mine B", etc you can just have several stations named "Iron Mine" and your train goes to the first available one. After that you can start going into circuit conditions and making it so that stations will only accept trains when there's something to pick up, or when there's something that needs to be delivered, so that the trains move around more efficiently. Now when you want to set up a new mine, or make a new smelting array, you can just slap down the same blueprint and the trains will automatically start rolling in without you needing to set up new schedules. Wow I kinda rambled there.

I think it's really worth mentioning trains as well. At the end of the video, you mentioned the differences between monolithic and microservice based architectures, and I think the best the to show that difference/similarity is in trains. If you consider your entire factorio base as a distributed service, trains exactly represent packet flow and more importantly packet delay and packet loss if you get a biter attack. If you consider your factorio base as a single monolith, then trains turn into interfaces. The train doesn't care how you actually insert the cargo, and how you process the items at the station. All it cares about is that it needs to drop of Item X and wants to go pick up item Y. This represents component design and individual classes and functions as well.

This video is great man, love it, keep up the good work 😂

Great video! I never really looked at Factorio as an example of software engineering. However when you showed the examples of Scaling, Load balancing, etc... I finally saw it. I guess that's why I enjoy playing factory games so much. It's the programmer in me being able to actually code something that works. I try coding Unity and just pull my hair out. Also, Nice to see so many familiar names from the Factorio RU-vidr space that I watch as well. I hope to see way more videos from you soon!

How does this video only have 35 views?? So good

This isn't just software engineering and factorio. It's the study of systems; it's used in nearly every discipline. For example: Chemisty for complex chemical reactions. Biology for reaction pathways. Economics for analysis of supply chains and such and it can become even more niche.

This is actually fantastic. You hit the nail on the head.

This is an amazing video you're so talented