Kooshaba

Honestly I was a brand new hire and it was my first real engineering job so I gained nothing from it. At the time I had no idea how to advocate for myself or my accomplishments. Big lesson learned.

I worked for a healthcare startup that interfaced with a lot of large insurance companies. They had no API access for their patient information and would just give us credentials to ancient web portals instead.

I wrote my own browser automation scripts to create our own internal patient API. Ended up reducing claim billing errors by a ton and resulted in 6 figures a month in additional revenue.

I can only say what worked for me. For as long as I can remember I was obsessed with video games. It’s all I thought about. I would play any genre, any platform, didn’t matter. However, I grew up in a very tech-fearing culture. Working on video games, let alone software engineering, was unknown and looked down upon.

I eventually made it into the software industry, but things never felt right. I would force myself to focus, changed jobs many times, and generally found it unrewarding.

I finally realized I should be doing what I already knew I was interested in and started making games. The hard part was peeling away the cultural brainwashing that prevented me from doing it in the first place.

Now I can’t believe I ever needed focus hacks. I can enter a flow state the moment I sit in front of the computer because it _matters_ (to me). There are still times when my inner dialogue starts to pester me with negativity, but I remind myself that in my heart of hearts I love what I do.

Do you have something deep down you know you want but avoid because it’s not “the proper thing”?

I'm in, let me know when ready

+1 to therapy.

Specifically, a therapist that cares about your condition long-term. I went through a bunch of therapy apps with very transactional therapy sessions which didn’t get my anywhere. I eventually found a therapist I visit in person a few times a month who has numerous multi-year patients. It’s been an entirely different, enlightening experience.

It’s like a MOBA or RTS, right click to move. Thanks anyway for trying it out!

I used Phaser for the game engine. Both the client and server run Phaser instances. I used React / Redux for the UI (this was a fun use case actually, having both a game and a traditional interface communicating with each other through Redux). The server is written in Node with a simple express server. I wrote a custom game manager that handles spinning up Phaser instances, placing players in them, and shutting down stale ones.

The network architecture is built on a combination of Websockets, WebRTC, and good ol’ HTTP.

Websockets is for all real time communication that I definitely want to go through (casting spells, players dying, etc).

I used WebRTC to handle communication for things that don’t need to come through reliably (game state). It treats the server as a “peer”, but only for the purpose of being able to blast packets back and forth without the overhead of a persistent connection.

HTTP is for general account management, matchmaking, and game creation.

Edit: You’re right, that’s totally a bug. Guess I need to do a better job of cleaning up after a round!

Become genuinely interested in other people’s lives and journeys. Go into every interaction thinking “I wonder what I will learn about this person?”

You can't fool me, I know this was just an excuse to improve your FPS aim!

Jokes aside, really good read. I had similar goals of cutting out sleep when I was younger. I'm curious what the authors mood was throughout the experiment. That's the main thing I've noticed when not getting enough sleep. My output may be good, I may feel engaged, but every second of the day is torture.