Best Of

I had a really interesting experience today. It was a complete "oh, duh" moment that was months in the making and solved a bunch of issues, and the circumstances of it are worth recounting.

A few months ago, one of our most experienced developers announced she was leaving. The R&D team had been rotating one of them being the primary support developer every two weeks, but as we hit a changing of the guard for this and other reasons I decided to take it over for a while myself and see if I could diagnose why the work was taking so much time / dragging us down so hard, and/or what could be done about it besides simply passing it off regularly so no one burnt out.

From here, my job slowly morphed into a Dr. Seuss rhyme:

so all we could do was to
sit!
   sit!
      sit!
         sit!
and we did not like it.
not one little bit.

I had a hundred things I wanted to work on, but this thing was weighing me down. And then a bunch of other similar stuff piled on, and it just killed my work buzz. I was getting cranky. But I still had no better idea how to handle it all without making things worse for the team. So I waited some more.

This weekend I built a Magic deck, went to a game store with @dark_arches and played sealed deck all afternoon, listened to Irish music in a bar with Aaron, planned the schedule for Expo, and then Sunday night I got so excited about something I was working on for Icrontic I stayed up til 2am working on it. I haven't done that in a long damn time. My mind was drifting back to Icrontic stuff all this morning, and then my Nintendo Switch arrived at lunch and I spent a little time getting that set up.

"OK, gotta really focus now", I thought as I turned back to the support queue. And that's when I realized what position we needed to hire next at work, and 15 minutes later I'd written a job description & proposal and bounced it off two other managers. It solves the problems, is a solid job in itself, and will make my life way better again. And, in retrospect, is perfectly obvious.

Yet I could not see it until I unclogged my brain and got it fired up about something else entirely.

I just realized: this is the first console OR handheld gaming system I've purchased... ever... in my life.

As a kid, I got an original Game Boy and later an N64 as gifts. I got an original Nintendo secondhand from a friend (post-N64) for like $50 but I don't really count that. Otherwise, @primesuspect has been doing the game system buying around here for the last decade.

@Charity and I played some MK8 on the flight back today. The game looks/plays great with split screen and local wireless. We knocked out 1.5 hours of our flight without even realizing it. No chance to try the Internet play, but might give it a shot tomorrow. Played a few of the new battle maps. Much better than the previous design. Hard to tell how well they play, though, with just AI.

Moving away from MK8, I grabbed Voez a couple weeks ago. Finished the rest of the flight with that. Everything is unlocked from the start. If you like rhythm games, it's fun, but a lot of anime-esque music. I'd recommend grabbing the "free" version on mobile to see if you like the style before paying the full $25 on the Switch. I think I read that if you paid to unlock every song on mobile (vs grinding), it'd be about $37.