Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category.
January 27, 2012, 2:53 pm
As you may know if you’ve been reading for a while, I’m a gamer. Have been pretty much my whole life. In fact, it was the prospect of creating my own video games that first got me into programming.
A while back, I purchased Elemental, the latest game by Stardock, a company with a reputation for making high-quality games and for being a lot more ethical than many gaming companies. Their Sins of a Solar Empire was the best-selling game of 2008, for example, even though they refused to put any DRM on their software. (So much for piracy destroying sales!) They’re also the guys who created Impulse, a Steam competitor that ended up getting bought by GameStop last year.
Elemental, unfortunately, was not a high-quality game. The basic concept was decent–not exceptional, but not *bad* either–but the game itself was a slow, crashy, bug-ridden mess. Several patches over the course of several months eventually got it to a mostly-decent state, but in no way did it live up to expectations.
They just did something that does a lot to redeem them in my eyes. I woke up this morning with the following letter in my email: Continue reading ‘An email from Stardock’ »
January 12, 2012, 9:13 am
Just thought I’d throw this one out there. My employer, WideOrbit, is currently hiring. We’ve got multiple development positions open for both Delphi and C#/Silverlight skillsets. (SQL experience, especially with MS SQL Server, really helps too.) At WideOrbit we build industry-leading software for managing broadcast media. If you live in the USA, there’s a pretty good chance your favorite station is running on WideOrbit software, and we built it in Delphi. (Mostly.)
Our development office is in Lynnwood, Washington, (about half an hour from Seattle,) and on-site work is preferred, though some exceptions do (infrequently) get made on a case-by-case basis. It’s a good location, right across the street from a major mall (plenty of places to go for lunch!), with good pay and working conditions. The office has a friendly, engineer-centric culture, and it really helps that the manager is a former coder and the boss still is one. No pointy hair here!
Only those who know what they’re doing need apply. The developers take an active part in the interview process, and we’ve got really high standards. We understand that the only way to develop good software is with good developers, and we try hard to make sure that that’s all we get. But if you’re good and you can demonstrate that you know what you’re doing, you’re likely to get an offer.
If anyone’s interested, send me a resume at mwheeler@wideorbit.com and I’ll see about getting you an interview.
June 10, 2011, 1:03 pm
Someone recently asked a very interesting question over at programmers.stackexchange.com. Unfortunately, though somewhat predictably, people jumped all over it and it ended up getting closed and then deleted within 20 minutes of being asked. That’s actually happening a lot recently, to the detriment of the community IMO, but that’s a subject for another time. But I think there’s some actual, worthwhile discussion to be had in this deleted question, so I’m preserving it here, along with the answer I would have posted. Hopefully it’ll be of interest to some people. Continue reading ‘Programmers and social skills’ »
April 28, 2011, 1:51 pm
Many years ago, back in 2000 or 2001, I forget the exact date but sometime in that time period, I ordered some books from Amazon and had them shipped by UPS. The shipping date came and went, and my books didn’t arrive, so I called up UPS, tracking number in hand, and asked them where my shipment was.
After looking it up, the lady on the phone managed to track down the problem. “We attempted to deliver it and couldn’t find your house.” Continue reading ‘The more things change…’ »
October 16, 2010, 12:46 am
A few weeks ago, I mentioned the release of The Way of Kings, the first installment of Brandon Sanderson’s new epic, The Stormlight Archive. I’ve had a bunch of other stuff distracting me since then, but this week I’ve finally put some time aside to read through it. And it did take all week. This is an enormous novel, 1000 pages in hardcover. Howard Tayler called it “the best argument you’ll have all year to get an e-reader, because you HAVE to have this book, but you might not be muscular enough to carry it around.” I’m going to disagree with that conclusion. Get the real novel. A digital display just won’t be able to do the beautiful, detailed illustrations in between some of the chapters justice. But he’s right that you have to have this book; it’s the Must Read Novel Of The Year if you’re into fantasy literature at all. Continue reading ‘Review: The Way of Kings’ »
August 10, 2010, 2:36 pm
This one’s way off-topic, but I figured it would be worth sharing.
Continue reading ‘What would you do in an emergency?’ »