About Me

All about me. I'll try to keep this short.

I've been programming since I was a kid. Here's me when I was nine years old, enjoying a lovely day at the beach:

Since that age, I've been into two things: programming and games. One of my friends signed my elementary school yearbook with a prediction that I would be making my own video games someday. I don't think I realized that was an actual possibility in life until much, much later.

I won't bother to discuss here where I went to college, or the companies I have worked for in the 10+ years I've been making games, or the 20+ finished projects I have shipped—if you care about those, you can find all that information elsewhere on this site. No, here I'll just yammer on about some random stuff about me and what I think about things.

Games are awesome. Programming games is awesome, too. Leading a team of awesome people to program awesome games, well, that's pretty much the most awesome. I'm always amazed when a team just gels together, and everyone is on exactly the same page when it comes to the project. Sometimes it happens organically. Sometimes it happens via thorough planning and documentation. But it's always amazing, and inspiring, and yeah...awesome.

Before I worked on games, I worked for an Internet company doing back-end programming for online communities—social networking before social networking existed. I did all sorts of cool Unix-y stuff, and that programming philosophy has definitely stuck with me to this day. I like my code lean and mean, and my games polished (but not at the expense of substance).

I have two rules of game development:

• If the player keeps on repeatedly pressing the A button (or its functional equivalent), they should eventually reach gameplay.
• If anything needs to move from Point A to Point B, its velocity should be nonlinear—every game feels about ten times more polished with ease-in and ease-out motion curves.

I enjoy snowboarding and scuba diving, though not at the same time (for now).

The person I probably have most to thank for where I am today is my Stuyvesant High School computer science teacher, Mike Zamansky. I learned more from him in high school than in my first three years of college computer science classes, and he continues to be a mentor, advisor, and friend to this day.

Oh, also, I'm a New Yorker. I've lived in New York City my entire life so far, and while I don't know if I will continue to live in New York in the future, I know that my heart always will.