20 years ago (damn, I am getting old) I was a co-architect for an electronic stock exchange of a G20 country, and for all practical intents and purposes stock exchanges are just another game genre. The project was fun and, among other things, allowed for real-time trading over the cellphones of that time (those with 9600 baud connection).

A few years later, I became a chief software architect working for a start-up that quickly grew into a rather large online game with half a million simultaneous players that processed half a billion user transactions per day. The project taught me a damn lot about such different issues as scalability, DB physical layout, server farms, attackers and cheaters of all kinds, and bot fighting — just to name a few.

Since then, I have consulted and performed due diligence on several game-related projects. In addition, I've spent quite some time researching the field and discussing related problems and their respective solutions with people from the industry.

I feel that this puts me in quite a unique position of knowing not only one single game, but a bunch of them, and being able to summarize and generalize my real-world experiences. Oh, and I have been writing for industry journals (and am especially proud of articles in CUJ and C++ Report) since 1998, so the process of typing sentences is not something new for me either.

If you really want further details, you can dig them out of my LinkedIn page