All of game server code at my current company is using C++, and we are still starting new projects using existing C++ framework. I gave a presentation on our server architecture a few months ago, available here (it’s in Polish, it was local event here in Kraków). After giving the presentation I was approached by a guy (sorry, don’t remember the name) who said something like: “It’s cool you did all that in C++.

While most of my programming life used to be centered around C++, nowadays I do not really spend much time with the language at work (other than doing code reviews). I remain big fan of C++. Despite the fact it’s not very fashionable language, it is extremely efficient and quite flexible. What’s even more important it’s continuing to evolve, and it evolves in the right direction. I took some time to try out the C++11 features refactoring small private project, and it really looks good.

Working with data is something I personally consider one of the coolest things one can do right now in the tech industry. Typically when someone thinks or talks about “Big Data” it implies petabyte data sets and Hadoop clusters spanning 100+ nodes. The truth is, even a lot smaller data and humbler infrastructure can provide great insights and drive the product/service innovation. To me its really a lot closer to “Smart Data” than “Big Data” - it doesn’t matter how big your data set is, but how much you are able to do with it, and how quickly.

Just like many others, in 2012 I spent significant amount of time playing Diablo 3. While I enjoyed the experience a lot, playing the game also pushed me to think about its design. What I found most interesting was random loot system and auction house. Because of that, I recently started to think if I can produce simplified model of virtual currency economy in a game with random loot. Now, one very important caveat: I did not try to model Blizzard’s game.

One thing has hit me while watching of this year’s LinuxCon Europe presentations - one of reasons virtualization exists in the first place is operating system inability to properly isolate the applications from each other. Look at it this way: the role of operating systems is abstracting the physical hardware from the applications. And what is the role of hypervisor? Abstracting the hardware from the opertaing system(s) … Which makes the operating system an application running under the hypervisor, doesn’t it?

We’ve had our first internal hackaton recently at Ganymede. We don’t have “20% time” rule or anything like that, so the entire thing was a huge experiment. What we did was to take not one, but two days (Thursday and Friday) off our normal schedule to allow people do some cool stuff.Obviosly, because we are a game development company, most teams decided to a game. With all my responsibilities, I did not commit to any team, but decided to do small project on my own - to last minute I did not actually know if I would be tied up in other stuff or not.