The Bull Og

When I started my latest job search, I selected about 20 top-tier companies I was interested in pursuing. Oh how much simpler my life would have been if I could have just subscribed to some sort of “Software Developer” job feed at each company!

Here’s a suggestion to all you HR units out there - make all of your job descriptions into RSS-feeds! I tried creating my my own Google Co-Op search engine but that wound up bombing because - I suspect - of the way that the jobs exist in the Deep Web.

If one of the big online job boards came up with an *easy* way to track the positions I’m in at the companies I’m interested in, that’d be great but until then, I say markup the job descriptions as feeds!!!

UPDATE: I found Indeed. Awesome. You can search by job title, company, and/or geography, just to name a few of the (most important IMHO) criteria. Salary search is in there too.

Or, JSON is the new XML. Or both.

The thing is, for fast data transfer, we should all be using binary transfer protocols in a language rich with data structures, right? But no one (read: major play-ahs) could agree on such so XML was born as the independent data interchange protocol. Right, it’s clunky and it doesn’t (easily) afford the structuring of complex data structures, but it was a major advancement at getting legacy systems to talk with one another when they have to.

Who saw XML coming to the browser? Well, as a matter of fact, I knew a guy at the IAEA who had been using AJAX-like techniques five years ago, but it was an intranet website and he only had to worry about IE. I knew another guy there who was singing the praises of thin clients. His idea was that that HTML was too bulky (I mean, come on, it’s markup and content all in one fell swoop, right) XML was the answer to have a minimal amount of content over the wire with the thin client being able to handle the markup/business logic. Sound familiar?

Looking at these JSON examples, I think the claim that “JSON is much easier for human to read than XML” is flat out wrong but I appreciate that for machines, it’s all the same.

Today, I had a chance to hear from Eric Bethke, Matt Mihaly, and Sulka Haro, all with fascinating things to say about providing market environments inside of games. I have to say, Habbo Hotel is one of the coolest things I’ve seen. Too bad I’m not in its target demographic. Not that I need another reason to spend more time at the computer…

I also had the opportunity to hear Ernest Adams. Woah. He had all kinds of craz-ee good things to say about story/game design, the summary of which is “it’s all about the user experience/there’s no one way to do it.” One of his slides was a list of different non-interactive story-telling methodologies. It’s all about your repertoire and how you use it.

I learned a lot this week. For one, a “main stream” developer like me could jump into the “gaming” industry and still fit in. No, I doubt I would play World of Warcraft for hours on end but you know what? I got skeelz. I was talking to someone at a fairly well-known gaming company who said that more and more games are needing developers who can do SQL. Yeah, that’s right, apparently not enough of the game developers like to deal with databases so there’s a niche to be filled. Can I do tools? It would appear so.

Can I do “out-of-game”? Uh, yeah, it’s this thing called social software. It’s been around in the Internet world for, uh, a while now.

This week has certainly been a challenge in communication. It’s difficult to walk into a new culture and “speak their speak,” even if it’s in my mother tongue.

Another thing I learned is, there’s still lots of potential in “casual games.” I get the feeling that hard-core gamers who attend the convention don’t like to be bothered with the other 90% of the world but, duh, that’s where the growth potential is! How do I get into some of that action?

Today was a good way to wrap up the GDC. Overall, I had a very positive experience at the conference; learned a lot, met lots of new people, and checked out new technology. I don’t know if I’ll be back. If I’m in a job next year that sends me, perfect. If not, I doubt I’ll take the week off and foot the bill myself.

Wow. The creator of Donkey Kong and Super Mario Brothers not to mention major creative force behind the Wii is an amazing personality. I knew I should have studied Industrial Design. If only I would have heard of the field before I graduated from undergraduate.

In other news, I’m either way ahead of the curve in the gaming industry or I’m crazy. I’d like to believe that the former was verified today by Raph Koster in his session on the intersection of gaming and the web where I was one of few “web geeks” in a room of 100 attendees.

I had expectations coming into the conference that web technologies would have would have an important role in the gaming community but I’ve been enlightened in the last four days. Raph summarized the business processes of creating a console game (which was of great help for me) and compared/contrasted that with web development. What an eye opener.

I wandered around today and visited a few sessions as well as the expo hall. I really didn’t see the utility of motion-based sensor software and other kinds of supplies for the gaming industry to me as a web developer until the evening. I went to a Dr. Dobb’s session on Second Life which pretty much was a bit of marketing for this event. It was at the session that I really was exposed to what Second Life is like (dancing avatars!) and that’s when I got excited about the possibilities of the metaverse.

I don’t know if motion-based sensor software/hardware can be “exported” to Second Life (though I understand export works for Maya and AutoCAD) but if so, the customization possibilities are crazy. Nintendo Wii? Playstation Home? XBOX Live? Mainstream MMOGs? This is crazy stuff.