Matt's Amazing Developer Blog 3000

The Internet needs another developer blog–and this is it.

Hey, thanks for checking out my blog! My name’s Matt, your humble(?) narrator, commentator, and blogger.

If you’re looking at this page, you probably want to know a little bit about me and my background, right? Well, here goes.

In the immortal words of Bill Cosby, I started out as a child. My father would take me to video arcades in the late ’70s, and I played some of those early games and really liked them–but I had never actually used a computer until my school got a couple of Apple IIs in the early ’80s. I got the chance to sit down at one of them one day, and something just clicked. Within a couple of weeks I’d borrowed a couple of books on BASIC from the library and had weaseled my way into getting time after school in the A/V lab where they kept the computers. After some study and much whining at my parents, I soon became the owner of a TI-99/4A, and then graduated to become one of those annoying Commodore 64 kids who hung around Electronics Boutique too much.

I spent my teen years learning to program, taking some classes at a local university and graduating from BASIC to Pascal and then to C. In high school, I landed an internship at a now-defunct game company, porting their twelve-metre sailing sim from MS-DOS to the Atari ST.

In college, my eyes were really opened to the world of computer science and software engineering, and I realized that this was what I wanted to do as a career. And it wasn’t too hard to get started. I was a big Unix geek at the time, and I quickly got a job as a sysadmin (I was known in the office as “the guy who knows how to program”). I went on to work for a research group invstigating distributed computing, and spent a couple of years as a network analyst as well.

In 1997, after a short-lived job as a database programmer, I had the opportunity to join Cyberlore Studios, and that was my entry point into the game industry. I quickly developed a reputation as someone who could work on pretty much anything, so I got to work on a lot of different things in a lot of different games. I also ended up heading the programming department there; in typical game industry fashion, I spent about 50% of my time managing and another 100% programming.

After six years there, I moved on to Blue Fang Games, where I held the position of Engineering Director. At Blue Fang, in addition to programming and management, I worked a lot on process. My biggest contribution was introducing Agile development to the company.

These days, I hold the title of Software Alchemist at The Electric Sheep Company, working on a variety of virtual-world projects.

I’ve also done a lot of side projects; if you google me, you’ll probably find some shareware and freeware I’ve written (and no, I’m not the Matt Kimmel who owns the web development company). I also wrote the infrastructure and a couple of games for the multiplayer boardgame site GameTable Online.

Okay, enough about my background. My professional interests include all kinds of things, from programming languages to kernel development to algorithm design to artificial intelligence to 3D Graphics–and pretty much everything in between. And I love delving into the process of programming: development techniques, tools, and all that good stuff.

You’ll read all about all of this in my blog. Have fun!