This milestone passed about three weeks ago but I’m now half way through my current employment contract. On March 2, I started work again and here we are, more than six months later. As with a lot of things, it doesn’t seem like that much time has passed. Obviously this is a good thing. I’ve been at jobs where it’s a total slog to get through the day but on most days now, the end of the day almost comes too soon.
I guess I haven’t mentioned too much about what I’m doing in my current role. Part of that is laziness and the other part is my ingrained nature to not talk too much about a game before it’s released. I can definitely say I was put in an area that I’ve really had very little experience in before. You can classify my current role as an online engineer. Most people think that means sending the zeros and ones over the Internet that tells everyone if you moved or shot your gun. While some online engineers do that, modern video games use the Internet to do so many more things compared to just even a few years ago.
Our online systems deal with commerce, telemetry, metadata, user account info, and a whole bunch of other data. I work with a great group of individuals who have helped me learn these new systems. I’ve asked a lot of dumb questions and I continue to ask dumb questions every day to figure out this stuff.
Some systems I work with, cause me more stress than others. The commerce system makes me really nervous. If I don’t do things right there, consumers can spend real money and they won’t see their virtual items in our game. Nothing gets people more incensed when they spend their real, hard-earned money and get zilch in return. Those are the type of bugs that Microsoft and Sony give you no leeway on (and deservedly so). Stuff like that keeps me worried on the weekends.
Overall, it’s been an enjoyable six months so far. I imagine the last six months will go by even faster.
So what you are saying is that the internet is a series of tubes, and you work on the tube related to money?
Interesting, I always thought it was just a big truck that you dump stuff on, like money, emojis and pictures of naked people.
Uh, I sorta work with what goes into the tubes and how I process what comes back. Tubes.