Well then you'll love the world of Microcontroller Programming!
You too can spend weeks optimising your opcodes to squeeze them into mere bytes of memory! You'll need the rest of the 8kb available for lookup tables, because your processor is only running at 8mhz!
You too can dream of a 'debugger' as you write and decode your own LED blink sequences!
You too can draw your graphics by timing your own NTSC scanlines!
You too can almost burn your house down using a soldering iron while sleep deprived!
You too can almost lose your mind when you find out that the reason your program isn't working is because your resistors have heated up by one degree since you wrote the code!
It's fun, the tooling to write the code can be as modern as you like, and the community is great.
It isn't as hard as it can be made to sound, precisely because the constraints quickly force you to think small. When you're only trying to make a device for automatically traumatising your cat, the constraints only pose as much of a problem as the much looser constraints you might encounter solving a larger problem with more powerful tools, say, running a website. So the learning curve isn't that steep if you're already a programmer.
http://electronics.stackexchange.com
And if that's still too sissy for you then just build stuff entirely in 555 timers: http://hackaday.com/2011/02/24/555-video-game/
I had one of the most entertaining hours of my university career in a lecture entitles 101 uses for a 555 timer, it should have been subtitled how to use and totally abuse a 555 timer.
Did that used to be called a 'nibble' or am I making that up?
(I'm just gonna end the joke there. This isn't going anywhere good.)
What on earth is he going to do with >$26,000? It doesn't cost that much to produce and ship the promised goodies to the backers, and it's not like he's going to need to spend a lot on marketing the thing. I guess he could just pay his living expenses for a bit while he works on it.
What's the general etiquette/precedent on kickstarter when someone receives backing vastly in excess of their goal? Is it acceptable to just plough the cash into whatever you want?
That only works if you're building stuff for yourself. And then only if it's for a hobby. Otherwise you find yourself trying to (e.g.,) stuff a complex and somewhat safety-critical(1) control loop with 16-bit fixed-point division implemented in assembler into a processor with 1200 bytes of memory.
(1) phone calls from the irritated client that your design caught fire and would have burned down his lab if he hadn't noticed the smoke at 5PM are generally not a good thing...
I did start programming back in the days of punched cards/early timesharing on IBM mainframes (late 70's), but my first microprocessor experience was at a laser-printer start-up (TeX project spinoff from Stanford, Imagen), so we had the luxury of using the Sun-1 boards (the boards that Andy Bechtolsteim designed for use at Stanford, and which were the basis of the first Sun Micro workstations, the first Cisco routers, and the first Imagen image processors).
The Sun-1 boards had 68000 processors (no VM) with dual UART chip, so we actually could attach a terminal and interact with our primitive software that way (both for download & debugging). I had to write a real-time OS from scratch in our case, since we didn't couldn't really use the huge galumphing BSD Unix port that Sun was producing for future release.
Memories...
I don't get to build as many of them as I once did, but they're incredibly fun little puzzles to solve. Cramming largish photographs, animation, copy (including fonts, which usually result in the bulk of filesize), and animation into such a tiny package is no small feat, and requires a lot of time (the productivity tradeoff Jacques referred to) and tons of little optimization tricks you need to spend a few years collecting and perfecting, like:
* becoming a vector artist. Sometimes its necessary to have a partially transparent image, which means 32 bit PNGs, which are super expensive. Flash allows you to create vector masks (vector illustrations are incredibly size efficient), which means you can use a PNG-8 or JPG and mask out the areas that need to be transparent. Which means getting really good, and fast, at tracing outlines. The next level being
* learning how to do photo-realistic illustrations. In the old days of 12k for a banner, I did a lot of car banners, which meant a lot of car illustrations that needed to look exactly like the photos. Even then, you'd have to reuse your assets a lot, in creative ways, in order to make the filesize. (Like using a tire illustration for the windshield [by scaling and masking]).
* writing really tight code. In the early days, our basic animation engines were a few KB, but you could rewrite your own using only the chunks of code you needed, and save a few K. My newest library is about 800 bytes and is powerful enough to use on most of my banners.
* learning that people really aren't as detail oriented as you might think, and blurs, rotations, tints, and speed are usually all the tools you need to make a convincing animation
