Quantum-thoughtsBarefoot software engineer in pants!

I wonder if you could use KickStarter a bit differently, to fund individual developers? I haven’t really contributed much to Pioneer this last couple of months since starting at Crytek, it’s just consumed all of my time.

I’d like too contribute a lot more, in fact I have a fecking long list which doesn’t even include all of the things that I’d like to do with it: https://github.com/fluffyfreak/pioneer/issues?state=open

This must be the same for some of the other Pioneer team too but our “real” jobs get in the way of the fun things we actually want to do.

So, how about KickStarter campaigns for individuals?
You list what you want to do, time estimated, and in priority order with whatever you think is a fair rate of pay for doing something you love.
Let say I did it, since I’ve just thought of it and don’t mind publicly discussing my finances :)

What if I could risk working for only 6 months next year (Hah! Again that is!). That would put my minimal funding for it at about £15k before tax to cover my mortgage and bills etc. Stretch goals would take you further through the list of things you hope to cover so I’d have:

• GPU terrain,
• orbitals,
• water,
• Faction Trade value differences.

For the first 6 months, and that would take £15k to get funding, if I got £15k then that’s what I’d deliver in that time before I bugger off and find more paying work, but stretch goals could also be:

• 3D cockpits,
• Threaded Job Scheduler,
• Atmospheric Heating and re-entry effects,
• Temporary decals showing shield hits,
• Rewrite noise system to use graph/nodes.

They could take the rest of the year and require another £15k divided into £3k chunks for each stretch goal.

All of that is just an example list, I think I’d be doing a lot more than that in a year of solid development on Pioneer for a start! :D money is just a guess as well as I haven’t taken taxation into account or indeed how that would even work :/

What I’m wondering from you lot however is what people think of the idea itself? Getting people to pay for individual developers on Open Source projects isn’t a new thing, there’s lots of examples of companies paying developers fulltime, bounties are a common way of funding large features too so it’s not that odd an idea.

Any obvious problems or flaws in the idea?

The new job is quite a big let down, well not all of it, but I’ve been neatly corralled into a role that no-one else wants because it’s so bad. So whilst I can see all the fun things that others get to do it has been confirmed that I will never be doing them. This is because they need someone to be doing the very annoying shit that no-one else wants to do. There’s no obvious route out of this role, or promotion prospects for anyone doing it (i.e: me), there’s no learning or development to the role, there’s not even any relief in the form of other minor tasks so that I’d be doing something else occasionally, in short, it’s the shitty end of the stick.

That’s not what the deal was when I took the job, but it’s what they had in mind all along.

So, dusting off the CV again and starting to look for jobs whilst I’m still in the probationary period.

Canada looks nice! Lots of people I know have been heading over there in the last few years. Although I’ll also just be hunting around the UK for random contracting roles or work just about anywhere I think.

It’s a shame as it’s not an awful place to work. It’s got some fairly crap bits though and I don’t think they realise it. The UK studio has a very unfortunate attitude in that they believe they’re really professional, but they’re not, they’re very childish, disorganised and amateurish about some things which is quite an unfortunate schism. It’s ok when a place is rubbish and knows it, but quite difficult when they don’t. I don’t think I’ll talk about it more right now. I did have a big rant partially typed up but decided that it just isn’t worth ranting about really.

A little nervous this evening as I’m starting at a new job at Crytek tomorrow.

The title is a little white lie, I don’t know anyone who finds being unemployed relaxing. Everyone I know is always running around trying to find more work.

Take the last few weeks for example: I’ve had several telephone interviews, written hundreds of emails, updated my LinkedIn profile, written a distance field ray marcher as a demo (over a two week period), done two technical tests – one taking 1hour 30mins the other spread over 3 days, started a company (Red Sail Games Ltd) for my own titles (if I EVER get the time to work on them), travelled to York & Scarborough to visit family and friends then rush back for an interview and then had Mark & Linda and 2 year old Layla stay for this weekend just gone, not forgetting that I’ve also had a minor bout of insomnia for the past week or so, also just been chasing agencies about work in fact in another window I’m just writing another email to one!

I am completely exhausted, as I sit here typing my left eye is actually twitching and aching! Odd.

So of course today I am also working on improving the program I wrote for the technical test that I’ve just spent 3 days working on. This is in case they come back and either want to know more or actually get me down for an interview. I may also use it just as an example that I can point people to since it can be used as a generic “map” implemented as a Red-Black Tree which doesn’t depend on the STL. There’s so many more things that I can do with it and I want to explore some of the options without having to keep it tied into the test framework that they sent me it in.

Oh yes I keep meaning to mention this too: BIRTHDAY(S)!!!

This year Danni is turning 30 on the 14th August, yes I know it’s hard to believe however -> I am also turning 33 on the 4th August and since we will be away over the weekend before Danni’s birthday and the day itself we’ve decided to do some combined celebrating on/around my birthday.

What this means is that there will be … a “thing” happening on Saturday the 4th August… as you can see, this has been carefully thought through. There may actually be a couple of days of celebrating this year just to spread things out a bit due to the bad weather. There might be a party however and probably a day out somewhere. I guess this is more warning than information :)

The other thing to note is the peramlink to this post… which is number “1234” ;)