Programming

Where I work, there's an abstraction for everything. Microfrontend architecture? Theres a team who makes a wrapper that you have to consume for some reason that abstracts the build process away from you. Devops? Same thing. Spring boot? Same thing. Database? Believe it or not, same thing.

Nothing works, every team is "about to release a bugfix for that", my team gets blamed for being slow. How do you deal with this?

Tech managers shouldn't be surprised they can't find candidates with good hard skills with an industry littered with junk like this.

I'm not saying I want to sit here flipping bits manually, but this seems to have gone too far in the opposite direction.

Hello,

My team and I are about to release our game on this Thursday 23rd May, and I wanted to share with you all the process of announcing to releasing a game in a 6 month time period

This is me procrastinating from doing real work because I’m nervous 🥲

The TL;DR:

1. We timed all our big announcements with events

2. People really really love ducks

3. TikTok converts surprisingly well

Here is the graph of our wishlists each day:

1. Announcing the game and putting the steam page live happened simultaneously during the Wholesome Snack Showcase during the Game Awards. It’s hard to know how the steam algorithm truly works, but I believe this strong start gave us a boost to our baseline wishlists each day.

You can see from the graph, but any time we have a big spike, there is still a 2-3 day period afterwards where daily wishlists slowly return back to the baseline amount, and that really can add up to a few thousand extra wishlists. 

Steam Next Fest has been by far our largest event for gathering wishlists and you can see how long the tail was afterwards, lasting almost the whole of February, which was entirely steam driven. I would say that we think that our success during Steam Next Fest was hugely helped by coverage from the press. You can see how halfway through the event we lost a lot of discoverability, but it increased again after the press coverage. Talking to other devs, they experienced a sharp drop-off with no recovery, so I think that Steam Next Fest is becoming increasingly difficult to do well in, as everyone is improving at gaming the steam algorithms for the event.

Most of our wishlists are from events, so I would say it’s important to keep an eye out for events and to apply to them when you think they suit your game

2. Our game contains a recently divorced detective, who happens to be a duck. 

It felt natural at the time to combine the serious nature of a Noir detective, with the most lovable of the waterfowl, but we now realise it made it much easier to market the game and quickly get people interested.

It doesn’t mean you need to start cramming your game with cats, dogs, frogs, and everything in between, but I think it has made our team realise the importance of having a very clear message as to why your game stands out in what is a very crowded space. 

3. TikTok and even Twitter does actually seem to convert to wishlists? This really surprised us as we’ve failed to have any traction on TikTok for years before this, but we managed to have a TikTok that surpassed over 1M views which is labelled on the wishlist graph, and you can see it was close to 1000 wishlists a day for a few days, which is sizable! Most of the small bumps you can see in the graph are also from posting other, less successful, TikTok videos.

It’s a lot of work making videos for any social media, so we’ve found that it’s better to make content true to ourselves and also lower effort as we still need time to make the game. We don’t do any voice over or show our faces in these videos. It’s mostly some gameplay footage cut together with an amusing caption and a bunch of relevant hashtags.

Hopefully this is useful to some people! Feel free to ask any questions (please distract me from work)

Oh bro is it a joke? Companies are asking freshers to sign blank cheques and freshers are considering them?

I don't understand how people are convinced that someone can make them work against their will. It doesn't matter if it's the Government itself, if you don't want to continue you GTFO without any consequences unless it's 1960 OR some weird communist country.

Sigh use some of your STEM smartness.

I was recently tasked with optimizing an existing API used by multiple teams, as its slow response times were impacting their processes. The optimizations were straightforward.

In some parts of the code, we were iterating over large JSON objects with a complexity of O(n⁴). Within the innermost loop, the length of an array was recalculated multiple times instead of storing it in a variable. Addressing this reduced the response time from 4s to 2s, especially given the large volume and size of documents processed.

Another improvement was implementing guard clauses—placing condition checks that could return empty values at the beginning of functions.