June 28, 2005
boox

I remember, when I was just a tater tot, reading in some children's story or other (I think it was a Doctor Boox story) about how someone wanted some free time or something to "catch up on his reading". It took me a while to figure out exactly what they meant by that - the obvious interpretation just seemed so strange that I couldn't believe that grownups had so much reading they had to do, that they would fall behind.

Man, I don't think I've ever been more wrong.

So, not to jinx it or anything, but it looks like I might be giving up the bachelor's life, and take a full time position at frog, maybe even starting as early as next week. The time and the commitment required are going to be a pretty big shock to my carefree contractor's lifestyle, but I really shouldn't turn down the money at this point, and it'll be good to hang out with some other nerds on a daily basis again for a while. Nothing's final, so there's still a world of possibility between me and an interminable series of days at the office, but hey, stranger things have happened.

In other grownup news, I made it through my third "Game Programming 101" class at ACC. Turns out, if you spend a couple hours putting together notes and writing them down on index cards, the lecture part goes a lot more smoothly, and I actually have stuff for people to do during the "make stuff go" portion of the class. The syllabus for the class has changed some from last semester - we're supposed to be focusing less on the act of programming, and more on the general role of the programmer on a development team, and how they interact with other departments, and whatnot - but I think I'm adapting okay so far, considering. I'm actually bucking the change just a little, and doing a python crash course this week, so we can get to the fun stuff next week - starting the main game project for the class - and so the students will have a better foundation in general programming nitty-gritty when I start talking about broader issues in development, and waving my hands around a lot more. Which should be pretty impressive, because I've almost taken flight a couple times as it is. Anyway. Python, yeah. Who would have thunk? More on that later, if I'm not too ashamed.

(June 28, 2005 11:21 PM)
Comments

congratulations!

Posted by: teno on June 29, 2005 01:13 AM

hey, cool. frog is a good place to work. the wonderful things about RealJobs is that when you get sick of them, you can quit.

the class sounds cool. how many students do you have to corrupt?

Posted by: narrator on June 29, 2005 09:17 AM

Frog does seem like a pretty cool place - my only real reservation (aside from getting up at a barbaric hour every morning) is their very Corporate NDA/IP/Non-Compete/Proprietary/We-Own-You contracty document thinger. I mean, I still work on lots of my own projects on the side - which, you know, any geek worth hiring should be doing - and as far as I can tell, if I sign on, they own any of that stuff that I create while I'm working there, and that's totally uncool. Kind of removes the incentive to try to do anything interesting while you're there. Like Spolsky says: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000071.html. Lots of stuff like that. I'm going to try to talk them down from that a little bit, but that talk never goes well, in my experience, and I'll probably wind up just signing it anyway, hold my breath, and hope they decide not to be dicks about it. But yeah, we'll see.

The class I'm teaching is pretty small, only a half dozen students with varying backgrounds, so it's been pretty fun so far. Should get more fun pretty soon, when we actually get to start doing games.

Posted by: Marc Majcher on June 29, 2005 10:32 AM
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