A Year of Toil
In a few weeks, I’ll have been at my day job for one year. Everyone keeps asking me what I’ve worked on, what I’m working on now, etc. Usually I can’t mention what I’m working on now since the stuff I’m doing now hasn’t been announced yet by our clients so it’s not professional for me to give away anything. Then, I usually forget to mention the stuff I have worked on because I’m working on new stuff.
So, I decided to do a year end summary of everything that I have worked on. Some of the projects I did a lot on, some things I only spent a little time on. The graphics and photography were both all done by our wonderful designers and photographers, so, much praise to them for such excellent work. I may have done a few small things with the graphics here and there, but most of the logic (not including animations), functionality and back end stuff was my doing. In other words, all the stuff you don’t think about or can’t see is what I did. In no particular order:
Games:
Monopoly Express
Sorry Express
Operation Rescue Kit
Pictureka!
Bullseye Baseball
Demos:
Fur Real Friends Squawkers McCaw
I-Dog Amp’d
Iron Man Repuslor-Power
Nerf N-Strike
Power Tour Guitar
Spider-Man 3 Ultimate Web Blaster
Star Wars TRANSFORMERS Darth Vader Death Star
Transformers Ultimate Bumblebee
Other:
I’ve worked on a few more, some with other clients, but I didn’t work on them enough, or they’re not exciting enough to mention (or I might have forgotten them!). The point of my job is to make these demos so that it makes the designers’ jobs easier.In my one year at my day job, I have been able to rework the existing technology in place and work in some of my own. Admittedly some of this is selfish because the less the designers have to come to me to fix and program things, the less work I have to do. So I made the programming part so simple for them to implement that they rarely have to come to me. When they do though, it gives me a better understanding of what I need to fix for the future and what’s not exactly clear or what needs to be redone. Most of the stuff needed to be redone because the previous developers before me probably didn’t have the designers in mind.
It’s a lot easier to do it right the first time than have to fix it over and over for each demo we do. We start each demo off of the same code base and I was having to fix EVERY piece of the demo for almost all the demos when I first got there. That’s enough motivation for almost anyone to rewrite everything and start from scratch. Now my job is almost non-existent with the new demos since I don’t have to keep fixing them and the designers can do their work without having to stop and get something fixed because of bad code. That leaves me with more time to work on things that will further the company’s portfolio (i.e. new technologies, broadening project requirements, etc). Making the designer’s job easier is probably my best contribution to the company so far.
I’m excited to see what the next year will bring and what I can come up with!