Raidbots is a series of tubes for WoW raiders that I've built over the last couple of years. It initially started as a way to collect data about player performance to get at real-world metrics. DPSBot aggregates hundreds of thousands of boss fight combat logs to see a data-backed comparison of classes and specs. EpeenBot highlights a specific player's parses against her own class/spec to see where she lies in the greater scheme of things. CompareBot is a utility to dig into multiple boss fight parses in order to see small variations of ability rotations or gear disparities to understand how their own performance can be improved.

I've spent a lot of time and effort optimizing the page response time on Raidbots. Raw data is available from World of Logs once a day which I download and process as a batch. The processing denormalizes a lot of data to make database lookups as fast as possible. Varnish is used to cache pages until the next batch is processed. Raidbots uses CloudFlare as a CDN to both get assets closer to the visitors as well as for minification of CSS, JS, and HTML.

Raidbots is hosted on its own dedicated non-virtual hardware both to minimize contention and to manage its sizable database (the Mongo database sits at about 100GB right now).

Real-time intelligence tool for EVE fleet commanders. Integrated with a custom Ruby web application to gather and broadcast fleet status to all corp members. Uses the fact that EVE's in-game browser sends player-specific information to a trusted server via headers on every HTTP request. The client-side of the application triggers an AJAX call to the Node server several times per second to update the server as well as receive any relevant state changes from other pilots. I built the application to integrate directly into our corporation's custom wormhole tracking tool. WELPS piggybacks on Ruby's session information and database.

I acted as the development (and often project) lead for the website for Cartoon Universe, a Light Persistent World developed by the Montreal WB Games Studio. I acted as technical contact with Montreal to integrate the Unity client seamlessly into our site. Working closely with our Web Operations group, we utilized Akamai to aggressively cache the site and game assets as well as handle geolocated access to the game. I also worked with our core web technology team to build our first implementation of our Drupal and Zend Framework integration (Drupal handling most CMS responsibilities, ZF handling more critical aspects such as authentication with WBID, account management, and web-based store functionality).

Gotham City Impostors is a multi-platform arcade style online shooter. The GCI website acts as the marketing and community center for the game with a number of game data integration features including leaderboards, player stats, and a snazzy match viewer.

I was a developer for the game announce site (game information, forums) and was the project lead for the game launch site (game data integration). I wrote much of the PHP backend that communicates with Hydra (a game data platform created by Agora Games) and presents game data to visitors. In addition, I worked closely with another developer to create the administrative UI to create and manage in-game challenges by the game community team.

Batman Arkham City is the sequel to the very successful Batman Arkham Asylum from RockSteady Games. The Turbine web team was tagged to create the marketing and game launch sites to promote the game, act as community hub, and integrate with the game itself (though this never launched due to external factors).

I was primarily a backend developer for this site with some front end implementation work as well. We heavily customized Joomla to work with our own framework to handle single sign-on and shared design. I worked on many of the informational aspects of the site including the news and galleries. In addition, I co-created a web UI to manage in-game messages of the day with another developer that was used to populate localized messages in the game itself via Hydra (game data platform created by Agora Games). This feed management system was also used for Gotham City Impostors.

I assisted with a number of other game data integration features that were never launched including a faction takeover system that would have changed the theme of the site based on in-game activity.

The LOTRO and DDO social networks were major initiatives at Turbine to increase player investment in the games, provide additional community tools, and establish a platform to build additional tools in the future. Initial features included player and character profiles, blog posting, event history, friend connections and messaging.

I was one of the developers for the integration of multiple systems and completely in charge of the WordPress implementation. Libraries that I created include the PHP code to understand and process the game data, friend activity feeds, tools for frontend data displays, and more. I worked on enhancing all aspects of the sites for both LOTRO and DDO over several major releases over two years.

I worked closely with another developer on the Java application that acted as the intermediary between the game data systems and the web. Together we created the underlying framework and schema for handling hundreds of thousands of character events per day and making that data available on the web.

Character signatures for LOTRO and DDO was a project to connect game data to the web via a generated image for use in the Turbine forums and elsewhere on the web. I built the entire image generation system as my first project when I started at Turbine. It's been a popular feature that is still being used today.

The signature generator uses XML templates to generate an image using the GD library. The XML defines various image generation actions that build a PNG layer by layer. Actions available include placing text on the page, layering transparent PNGs based on variables, and more. Information about a character are available to use as variables in the template to do things such as using different portraits based on race and gender, showing attributes such as name and level, and so on.

The XML templates and isolated assets make siggen incredibly easy to update without requiring any code changes. New classes, races, or level brackets can generally be added simply as an asset drop without any downtime required.

The LOTRO and DDO API applications were built to expose game data to players in a simple form so they could build their own applications or integrate with their own sites.

I built the first version of data.lotro.com in a few days as a skunkworks project to prove that the site would be fast to develop. It included a basic developer key system, 24 hour caching, and access to key character information. Over time we've expanded it to include XML data about items and guilds as well.

The system has been successful with players creating iPhone apps, website integrations, and libraries for various languages.

EVE Online has some of the most complex systems of any MMO out there. Tools both in-game and out-of-game are rarely useful in displaying information in a way that is easily digestable. I built the Item Comparison Tool in order to quickly understand item differences and hierarchies.

I used JavaScript and AJAX extensively to create a client-side application that would let visitors search and select items, show only their differences, and sort them based on any attribute. In addition, I built a number of backend tools to update pricing information on a daily basis to be able to have up-to-date measurements on cost/benefit for each item.

While it's no longer online, I also built a webapp to understand the total worth of your own assets retrieved from the EVE API and using the same pricing systems I had built for the Item Comparison Tool.

As a student web developer, I was directed to create a general PHP-based system to handle content management on the college's News and Athletics site. This simple request begat a fully featured custom CMS that is being used for nearly all aspects of Carleton's website today as well as many other school's in the Midwest.

I wrote all the initial code to handle the very flexible database schema, admin UI, and basic frontend capabilities. Another year as a full-time developer on staff saw much more functionality and a migration to have most sections of the Carleton website using the CMS. Over the past decade, it's grown into an open source project used by a handful of colleges in the Midwest.

While not technical, Kamigami stands out as an important project that I am still proud of to this day. My wife and I started out in Kamigami as normal members but quickly became core members and eventually ended up with full ownership of the guild as the original players fell away from the game.

Kamigami started out as any other random guild tackling 25 man raids. Over the course of two years, we managed to improve until we were roughly in the top 5-10% of all 25 man guilds. Our greatest achievement, however, was that we were able to create and maintain a friendly, adult atmosphere the entire time that avoided most of the stereotypes of other successful guilds (immature, unfriendly to women, negative/hostile atmosphere, etc).

Leading a guild taught me a number of lessons that I use every day: how to lead and work with a team, providing positive and negative feedback, making choices about recruitment, diffusing and resolving conflicts, and keeping morale up while working on hard problems.