Career

Early Project History

I began learning programming languages at a time when internet resources were limited. I referred to the F1 Help documentation for some of my first projects, and later picked up some books. The languages I started with in the early years were: Basic, C++, and Python.

During High School, I put together the Game Creation Club. At the end of the first year, we shipped a platformer game, epic in scope! We used C# and XNA Framework to complete the project. XNA Framework was a C# wrapper for Direct X designed for convenience, and the appeal was that an XNA application could target the Xbox 360 platform as part of the new Xbox indie program that eventually became ID@Xbox. Fez was such a game built on the platform.

A group of us friends splintered off of the Game Creation Club to form Friday Game Studios. In a time before the popularity of the Unreal and Unity engines, we built our own engine. For our tooling needs, we often extended our favorite 3D package, Blender. For character animation, we set up a budget-friendly motion capture studio in a friend’s basement.

During my Senior year of High School, I attended a computer science course at the local University as part of a running-start program. I participated at the first ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) Hackathon and came home with the grand prize. Employers at the next career fair took notice and I landed my first internship at Chief Architect at the end of my freshmen year at the same University.

Chief Architect Internships

Chief Architect is a CAD software for home design and remodeling. As a first job, I could not have asked for a more suitable project. I built several features for the application over two Summers.

The main highlight of my time there was my work on the 3D navigation controls. I was assigned to create the ‘focus’ tool, a tool that orients the 3D view to display the object(s) of interest. While working on the tool, I saw the opportunity to refactor the mouse controls to alter the behavior of panning, orbiting, and zooming. I made the controls as polished as playing a video game! These navigation changes were massively popular with the community at large.

Xbox - Services, Productivity & Intelligence Team

During my Junior year of University, I felt ready for the workforce. I left the University without a degree, and months later I was hired as a contractor for the Services, Productivity & Intelligence team at Xbox.

My main responsibilities were to oversee the development and installation of telemetry and A/B experimentation client libraries for a number of Xbox franchises: Crackdown, Age of Empires, Forza, Microsoft Solitaire Collection, and Minecraft.

The team I was on went through a number of restructurings and became the PlayFab team after PlayFab’s acquisition. During the acquisition, I joined forces with the Minecraft Data team to work on the design of telemetry and essential business metrics.

I helped the Minecraft Data team manage its transition to a phase where the flagship product was available on all popular gaming platforms and new content updates were being released on a frequent basis. We saw our hard work pay off when Minecraft’s player base became multi-generational and succeeded in engaging players both new and old. My team was an important part of achieving this success in a deliberate fashion.

Mojang Studios - Data Team

I left my job after a 3 year stay to go do some world travel. After a two-year gap, I once again rejoined the Minecraft Data team. There I continued my work to provide a stable data platform for Minecraft, taking on more responsibilities, particularly with data processing in the Azure cloud.

After two more years of hard work, I left in December of 2022 to evaluate my goals as a newly-out transgender individual.