Here I Go
Last week was my last week as Frontend Architect at Splice.
It was a wonderful place to work! They make amazing products! They're hiring and get my full okie-dokey. After years in the developer advocacy role I got a chance to get my skills up-to-date, spearhead the adoption of Svelte(kit), and work with a bunch of huge music nerds who are building tech for other music nerds. But at the 4 year mark (in November), I got an itch. After working at Mozilla for 8½ years I swore I'd never work another job that long, that I owed it to myself to try something at least sort-of new and different (even if it's still writing code) periodically.
When I was laid off from Glitch in 2020, I was severely burned out from a decade+ in tech, the last 6 of which had been in developer advocacy. I was fortunate enough to be able to take some months off (thanks glitch union for some severance) to deal with the World, decompress, and finally figure out what Minecraft was all about. While unemployed, I had the wild hare to try out independent game/app dev. It's something I've always thought about since I was a kid- "make video games" has been a dream of mine since it became apparent that they were things that were Made, and not just hatched from the demo kiosks at Sears. One of the few things on the first computer I had access to was QBASIC, and lacking games to play other than Treasure MathStorm and the demo to Commander Keen, I would make games; for my friends, my sisters, but mostly for myself.
It turns out that 2020 of all years was not the year for me to go indie. I was still fairly fried, I had no plan, and it was clear that given all the free time in the world wasn't leading anywhere in particular (Minecraft is really good though). It was time to Get A Job, and after interviewing at a few places, I was very kindly referred to Splice by a friend (thanks Sue!) as a place I'd like, and it worked out! I decided to re-tool from "dev advocacy" back to straight-up frontend engineering.
In the meantime, I dabbled and I planned. To pass the idle pandemic evenings, some friends and I built a multiplayer web board game inspired by Carcassone. I put together a proper business, Twenty Minute Mile. Excited by the Playdate, I learned some Lua and shipped Smolitiare, which was well received and made money! Not "quit your job" money by any means, but at least "LLC has a reason to exist despite my accountant's continued and ongoing skepticism" money. Heavily inspired by the wordle craze, my pal Andrew and I cooked up Listed. And I wrote down every game idea that crossed my mind. I now had done at least Something, but finding the energy to code as a side-hustle with a full-time job was challenging.
Back to that itch. In November talked to Caitlin about it. She told me there would never be a perfect time to do this, and we were in a good place to try it now. So a plan was hatched: take a year and give the indie dev thing a go. By the time I had fully convinced myself to take the plunge, it made sense to finish out the quarter at Splice.
Here we are! Here's the plan:
- build and ship some games! duh. I'm hoping to publish some smaller game demo/ "singles" on itch.io in the short term, and build toward a larger game or two this year.
- make other things- possibilities include iOS app development, doing proper Content (podcasts/yt vids), some tabletop stuff
- share the process- share something here every week - be it a toy, a process post, or just cool stuff I've found. I'm also planning routine gamedev streams (tba)
- collaborate- I know so many incredible people who make kickass things and I'd love to team up with as many of them as I can- even if it's just streaming together. (cool friends hmu)
- some consulting as opportunities present (cool people who need FE expertise and like paying money hmu)
- (stretch goal) get Twenty Minute Mile to a place where I can pay myself a wage
I'm giving myself a year, an amount of time I'm beyond privileged to be able to afford. I'm hopeful that it's the first year of many, but I can't predict the future: I may hate being my own boss, I may completely lack the discipline to see things through in a way that generates income! Despite the groundwork I've laid, I'm entering a new field and there's so much more that I don't know than I can even anticipate. I'm entering an industry that's in a state of tumult, where indies can find an audience and breakout success, but other unbelievably talented people are exploited and grind for years without being able to make a fair wage. If I have to go back to W2 work, I won't consider it failure.
Folks have asked how they can support me- eventually I'll have a more concrete answer (like buy my stuff) but for now just follow me here and on my socials. Unless you have a Playdate- then have I mentioned Smolitiare?
See you out there!
† despite the date, this is not a joke. I am the only fool here