Flappy Hatchlings
Hi! Happy 2nd mail everyone. Some house keeping, I’ll probably do a shorter gap for the next mail - then I can keep them at the start of the month.
So, a lot can happen in a month. I started working on my new job, I co-shipped a pretty popular game, I moved house and now have only really found some time for balance.
Microsoft
It’s been really cool working at Microsoft. I know I'm on a small team inside one of the worlds biggest companies but I really feel good about the folks I get to collaborate with on a daily basis.
it feels like Microsoft is really trying to take on the ‘empathetic tech giant’ angle. If Apple is cool, Google is comprehensive, Facebook is connected, then Microsoft cares. It’s an interesting dynamic that you don’t see too much as a general consumer, but the modern Microsoft tends to land very close to my own perspective on a lot of how tech folks should interact with the world.
The team I’m on, TypeScript, is pretty different from Artsy. Every part of the Artsy code bases were continually seen through fresh perspectives and they were really easy to make shallow contributions everywhere. The TypeScript codebase is more mature, both technically and culturally - someone’s code could take weeks to get right. That changes the teamwork dynamics - it’s interesting and different.
So far I’ve been struggling with contributing - I’m new and it’s so easy to get jealous of folks who have been doing this for years who can just know instinctively how things get fixed. Normally I’d make a side project on the domain to try and learn from a few different angles. However, I’ve not had time for that, so I feel behind. Even if this is just a normal learning curve. It’s been close to a decade since I’ve really joined another large codebase (Artsy has just started a rewrite when I joined, and I helped start the mobile apps from scratch) so maybe this is just what it’s like.
Moving house
The day after I got back from onboarding at Microsoft in Seattle, we moved to Brooklyn. Mostly for space, and a friend was planning on finishing his lease. I like the neighborhood (Crown Heights), its smaller, a bit quieter and a lot more green.
I’ve been working on our garden, and have all the foundations of an amazing office (with space for co-workers) in one half of our basement (which has more space than our entire last place!) - you can see it in this tweet.
I need to find a gym, and figure out how to make sure I get some balance, but it’s been going well.
Flappy Royale
So hey, OK - the first time I mentioned Flappy Royale publicly was last month in my inaugural mail - it’s turned into a bit of a thing since then. We’ve had folks play about 12 million games!
I had some time between jobs, and I’d been low level bummed that so many of my big projects were replicated by larger companies (this is also a good thing, frees me to do something else eventually.) So I reached out to a friend, Zach about co-working at his office and we joked that someone should mix Flappy Bird with Fortnite - because the mechanics of Flappy Bird deserved more love. I was lucky to have Em Lazer-Walker staying at my house who was open to giving it a shot too.
I’ve built games before and it felt like a pretty small project, doable in a month probably. It took double that, which for a software project is kinda OK. It definitely ended up a bigger game than we expected.
Shipping the beta was mad, we were seeing new articles every hour - seeing some of the big gaming websites feature the game was a real highlight for the month. The traffic blew through all of the reasonable server limits on the game in 30m, and I had to switch us to the the highest server tiers - effectively pay as you go, which we were projecting would cost about $3500 a month!
Within a few days Em had progressively got these costs down to maybe $100-200 a month, which should be covered by the ads. So far, that’s not quite flappy millions - but you never know. We just got mentioned in the 2nd biggest daily paper in Spain, so it is starting to permeate out of the tech scene and into the rest of the world.
What turned out real nice about Flappy Royale is that I got to work with Danger on it. It’s rare that I get to have danger as a true collaborator on software - given that she’s somewhat digital-adverse. She built out a fabulous set of characters and styles that made me really proud.
If you’ve not tried it maybe click - https://flappyroyale.io