How many beers until the bugs are fixed?
17 years ago, I created the Ruby library redis-objects to solve a problem I was having at PlayStation. I never expected to still be maintaining it so many years later — it’s older than my kids! I just released version 2.0, which got me reflecting on the journey and lessons learned.
I’ve used Wordpress for many many years, but I got to the point where I was tired of paying $100/year for a blog that gets a few hundred visits per month. I’ve played around with static site generators like Jekyll but have always dreaded the amount of time it would take to convert my existing Wordpress blog. Then I realized one evening: Why would I do this myself in the age of AI? Enter Claude…
Life at a fast-moving company is full of swings, highs, and lows. But managers often fail in one of their most important responsibilities: providing stability for their teams. Managing teams is like stock market investing. Here’s how.
This is not a clever technical article where DONUT is some obscure new encryption algorithm. This is about getting people to lock their laptop screens. Using donuts.
One of my favorite career accomplishments so far was founding the Amazon San Diego office. I wrote the 6-pager proposal and presented it to Amazon VP/SVPs to gain approval. I was employee #1 in the office, hiring a team that grew to 300+ people in less than 3 years (now it’s >2,000). Here’s a bit more of the behind the scenes.
Based on the response to my GDC 2014 talk, I gave an expanded talk on game analytics at GDC 2015. You can watch the video for free in the GDC Vault.
I gave a talk at GDC 2014 all about game analytics and AWS. In the talk, I showed how to start small by uploading analytics files from users devices to S3, and then processing them with Redshift. As your game grows, add more data sources and AWS services such as Kinesis and Elastic MapReduce to perform more complex processing. Here are the slides on Slideshare and the videos on YouTube.
With the launch of AWS ElastiCache for Redis this week, I realized my redis-objects gem could use a few more examples. Paste this code into your game’s Ruby backend for real-time leaderboards with Redis.
Linux distributions still ship with the assumption that they will be multi-user systems, meaning resource limits are set for a normal human doing day-to-day desktop work. For a high-performance system trying to serve thousands of concurrent network clients, these limits are far too low. If you have an online game or web app that’s pushing the envelope, these settings can help increase awesomeness.
My poor little laptop hard drive had been whining and whimpering, so I upgraded it to an SSD. Turned out to be inexpensive and very DIY friendly, so here are my cliffs notes.