About

Coming to a PS3 near you

I’m currently Sr Manager of Online Technology at Sony PlayStation. In layman’s terms, that means I make video games for a living, stuff like ModNation Racers and MLB: The Show. In techie terms, my team does online servers and community websites for San Diego Studio titles in a mix of Ruby, Rails, Sinatra, MySQL, Redis, and other goodies.  We run everything on Amazon Cloud (AWS), and I’m on the AWS Customer Advisory Board.  Modern tech options are pretty amazing, actually.

Sun E10k server, aka ca$h cow

Way back when, I started as a UNIX sysadmin, briefly at UCSD and then on to Sun Microsystems, at a little known San Diego R&D site.  We were just down the street from MP3.com, and responsible for spitting out the giant E10k server. It was the dotcom days (the first ones…) and life was good.  The E10k was perfect for running large-scale DB’s, which places like eBay all of a sudden needed lots of.  We sold thousands, at a pricetag of $millions a piece.  They would back up the dumptrucks of cash while we drank from kegs of microbrews between the buildings on campus.  I’m not kidding.  Ask anyone who was there.

The name “Nateware” was coined by my boss at the time. I was doing Solaris and Cisco sysadmin stuff, writing homegrown apps in Perl and then forcing helping people to use them.  My favorite was the “statustool.pl” Perl CGI script I wrote in a day because I was sick of wasting time emailing status reports.   Others starting using it, and it caught on like crystal meth, so upper management decided to rewrite it in Java.  12 months and $300k later, they scrapped the rewrite and just kept using the Perl one.

Since then I’ve unleashed a bunch of Nateware upon the unsuspecting internet.  Evil Plan Step 1: Complete.

They actually posted this on their website for an hour or so

Anyways, like all good things, the dotcom days came to an end once people realized they actually didn’t want to buy pet goldfish online.  (For the dotcom history buffs, the pets.com sock puppet was the #1 selling item they offered.)  Napster and MP3.com went belly up, Sun’s stock price went from $120 to $4, and the resale market for E10k’s emerged — on eBay, ironically enough.  The hangover was rough, a lot of people got laid off, and when the guy sitting next to me got the axe I decided it was time to go.  I had bought a house and developed a healthy microbrew habit (BeerLabels.com) , and beer doesn’t buy itself.

Which worked out awesome, actually, since I’m now at Sony PlayStation making video games for a living.