2013 Year End Update

Once again it has been a while since I last posted here. Many reasons for this, mostly due to career changes. The last time I had posted I was working for a company called Zebra Imaging. After a good run in holography, the call of game development was pulling me back into the field I love...

At the start of 2013 I took a contract position for EA Sports. I worked on franchise mode for NCAA Football. This was a great experience for me, very rewarding. I was able to be a part of the NCAA 14 release and earned my first console game development credit. Working for EA was a wonderful place to work and the engineers that I worked with were very bright. It isn't easy building a AAA game every year, and even more difficult to take the same game and re-envision it each iteration. The team was very good at handling both of these challenges and in being a part of this process, I have learned much about production schedules and distributed development.

Unfortunately, this year EA has decided to end the development of the NCAA Football franchise of games. It was a shame as the next iteration promised to be great as well. I, being a contractor at the time was unfortunately not retained as a member of a different team. I was in the situation of looking for work again. Luckily, as a software engineer in Austin Tx, finding leads for new opportunities was not as difficult as I was imagining. It only took me about a month to find a new position. My new home is working on a contract with Aristocrat Inc. A world wide manufacturer of slot machine games. This work has turned out to be much more interesting than I had originally anticipated and the experience has also been quite rewarding. I am learning a lot about hardware drivers that I never knew and much about the Windows low level operating system features that I never bothered to investigate in the past but have found that the understanding of which has greatly improved my understanding of how the operating system handles distributing and managing of resources that my applications are requesting. I was very sad to have to leave EA but I am glad that I have found a new home (hopefully not as temporary) in a place that I find interesting and engaging.

On the personal development side of things, I have been doing a wide variety of side projects. From helping out a friend work on preparing his kickstarter, to working on a Unity platformer title here and there (to be announced by me sometime in the future in more detail), some additional side contract work when I can find it, and finally for Christmas I received a Nexus 7 from my wife which as spurred me to dabble in some Android development. The Android development stuff I hope to be releasing in the early part of 2014 as some smaller apps for sale or for free on the market place.

All in all, as a software developer, I feel like 2013 has been a year of growth for me, both intellectually and professionally. I look forward to 2014 with some hope that it will be a little less stressful, but at the same time with greater ambition for completing some of my personal side projects. I also wish for the best for my friends and family for the new year. Who knows, maybe I will be a little more ambitious with this site or maybe a rework of the site/new address is in order. All of that is speculation however as I have put little thought into the blog in a while.

Happy New Year
-Chris