Anson the Gnome

Slashdot alerted me to an odd article from last week on Taco Bell Programming. The odd thing about it, to me, is this aside about DevOps, "where system administrators start writing unit tests and other things to help the developers warm up to them...." Ted Dziuba's response is the, errr, opposite? "Taco Bell Programming is about developers knowing enough about Ops...."

Both of which sound pretty much the same to me. I've ranted about this before, but it boils down to this: we're all on the same side. Whether you are so small you don't have any dedicated sysadmins or DBAs, or so large that you've got a dedicated team of each: what you do impacts the operation of your game, and the operation of the game impacts you.

Work with other teams, get to know what they do (a good goal: know it well enough to be a useful sounding board), and keep talking to each other. If you're worried about the Operations staff poking into your development domain and swirling it around... maybe it's because there are problems, pressing to Ops but ignored by devs. Maybe you should get that fixed, and worry less about who fixed it. :-)

As for "Taco Bell Programming," or "using basic tools in surprising and clever ways:" sure, do it when it's feasible. Solve your problems simply if you can. And if you can't... well, then it's time to be a good programmer, isn't it?

I wrote an article for the IGDA Newsletter trying to better address the security concerns in MMO trade systems I discussed earlier this year; even if you read the previous blog post, I think the new one is worth reading by itself. Thanks to Scott Jennings, Peter Harkins, Ammon Lauritzen, Jeramey Crawford, and John Henderson for feedback on earlier drafts. I wasn't able to incorporate all of their feedback, but the article is better for everything I did include.

EDIT: boy is my face red, I did not include John Henderson. My apologies.

Late last year I was talking about helping the rest of the BioWare team be more productive, and I feel like I took great strides in that direction. Although I wasn't hired to work on the build system, I was tasked with making some minor improvements here and there, and I quickly realized it needed someone's full attention. By the time I left, I was able to expand the single build machine managed in spare time to a multi-platform build farm managed by a team, which is the right way to approach builds for a project of that scope.

I accomplished what I wanted - I expect to leave a lasting positive impact on the productivity of the team - and I got to work at BioWare while doing it. They're a great group of studios, and it seems like they have had a big effect on what it means (and what it's like) to work at EA. However, I came to realize that core game development was what I really wanted to be doing, and another studio was the perfect storm for me: KingsIsle Entertainment is small, but they've got a successful live game.

I like small, because it means I have more of an impact and risks are lower. However, after my time at 2K Games on a small team making a game no one will ever see, having a live game (or, admittedly, the kind of studio support that The Old Republic has) is also important to me. If it's an already successful live game? Well, that means I'm less likely to be writing this post again in a year, and I'm ready to settle down now. I started at KingsIsle yesterday, and as I get back into game dev I'll try to have more juicy posts up here. :-)