Sandy: No plan survives first contact with the enemy

[MysteryMan]

Logress, GGG, the head of customer support, and a few others were hit pretty hard by Sandy. They are working hard to scavenge access to electricity and internet connectivity, but won't be working full time for at least a few days (I assume they are searching for bottlecaps in the CT/NYC wastelands or something).

That means (aside from our Flash team) our staff is rather developer heavy for the next few days.

The normal sprint schedule will resume when the Sandy damage is repaired, but until then the developers run wild...

Current short term goals until the play balance and business people are back (in order)
- Get the test network fully online. When Logress is back he's going to put new starters online and we want to be able to let people test them without breaking stuff.
- Logress left us a list maintenance tasks. Get those done.
- Fix a bunch of bugs. The flash team is out because of sandy, but we can still take care of things like the double login issue.
- Test out our new toy (KendoUI) by redoing the card list. The search should be dynamic... (a dropdown should let the use choose a field.. say "Card level", then valid operators should appear, like "greater than", then a textbox should appear with a validator... the user can hit + to add it to the list or - to remove it).
- If the customer support starts to drag, either pull in staff from the minecraft server or get us an 800 number (landlines and pens don't need electricity).

[Peralisc9001]

That hurricane looks pretty harsh. I have the one guy in my facebook list posting photos of small sharks in his backyard.

[Callonia]

We actually have more than three staff members?

[Peralisc9001]

We actually have more than three staff members?

Amazing.

[MysteryMan]

We actually have more than three staff members?

Amazing.

When the power is back I should have people who aren't eaten by the Kraken make an intro post.

[Callonia]

We actually have more than three staff members?

Amazing.

When the power is back I should have people who aren't eaten by the Kraken make an intro post.

Looking forward to it xD

[ChiYoung]

I'd LOVE staff intros. When I was playing logress was the only one who posted on the forums.

[VertuHonagan]

I love the Fallout reference there MysteryMan. Also I look forward to seeing the new starters! I hope they will help out a lot!

[MysteryMan]

I'd LOVE staff intros. When I was playing logress was the only one who posted on the forums.

Here's some major players who you may not have met:
- ThatDave: He's in charge of marketing and customer support. Funny guy with some comedy gigs on the side.

Dave is a friend of mine from college and staff at ConnectiCon (a self-funded gaming event that had 10,000+ come this year). He's a bit more extroverted than I am. Example: When I presented my work at a Microsoft Silverlight Hackathon on my own (with little sleep/sick) I got last place (great tech, poor presentation). When I had Dave present my work at an Android Hackathon at the Google Cambridge office we walked away with the grand prize/first place (slightly less impressive tech, much better presentation).

- Vadym. He's in charge of the contracting firm that takes care of most of our internal infrastructure. You notice how most of the problems we had were due to third party vendors and not the in-house network? That's because Vadym's stuff is solid work. He's the unsung hero who you only notice when things go wrong. None of his stuff went wrong so you probably never noticed him or his staff.

- Alex. Another contractor. In charge of Flash Development. (Our in-house staff are .NET/HTML5 engineers primarily). I've seen him produce in an hour, without exaggeration, what takes most people over a week.

The thing you have to understand about developers is that from a statistical standpoint, a decent developer will produce 10x more than a poor one, a good 10x more than a decent one, and the like. The pay scales do not increase proportionality to the gained productivity so you can see some ridiculous gains in output if you have a small team of top tier engineers instead of a large number of junior engineers. Alex is a top tier engineer.

Paul, Andrew, and some of the others are in-house devs who need to post their own damn introductions. I've been working with .NET since it was released to the public (over 10 years, mainly working with enterprise level products). Most of the current team consists of some of the best who I've worked with in past projects. You'll notice in the upcoming sprints that our specialty is in new development.