Articles by Date

• 21 Mar 2014 » Game Analytics with AWS at GDC 2014

  I gave a talk at GDC 2014 all about game analytics and AWS. In the talk, I showed how to start small by uploading analytics files from users devices to S3, and then processing them with Redshift. As your game grows, add more data sources and AWS services such as Kinesis and Elastic MapReduce to perform more complex processing. Here are the slides on Slideshare and the videos on YouTube.

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• 08 Sep 2013 » Real-time Leaderboards with ElastiCache and Redis Objects

  With the launch of AWS ElastiCache for Redis this week, I realized my redis-objects gem could use a few more examples. Paste this code into your game’s Ruby backend for real-time leaderboards with Redis.

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• 06 Apr 2013 » Linux Network Tuning for 2013

  Linux distributions still ship with the assumption that they will be multi-user systems, meaning resource limits are set for a normal human doing day-to-day desktop work. For a high-performance system trying to serve thousands of concurrent network clients, these limits are far too low. If you have an online game or web app that’s pushing the envelope, these settings can help increase awesomeness.

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• 01 Dec 2012 » Replacing Macbook HD with an SSD

  My poor little laptop hard drive had been whining and whimpering, so I upgraded it to an SSD. Turned out to be inexpensive and very DIY friendly, so here are my cliffs notes.

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• 10 Feb 2011 » Controlling What You Can

  Yesterday, my good friends up at United Front Games had their game True Crime cancelled by Activision. My team worked closely with United Front on ModNation Racers, so I know firsthand that UFG is a standup studio of hardworking guys and gals.

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• 14 Jun 2010 » Atomic Rant Redux

  My atomic rant has gotten a ton of traffic

  • more than I forsaw.  Seems atomicity is a hot topic in the web world these days. Increasing user concurrency, coupled with more interactive apps, exposes all sorts of edge cases. I wanted to write a follow-up post to step back and look at a few more high-level concerns with atomicity, as well as some Redis-specific issues we’ve seen.

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• 18 Feb 2010 » An Atomic Rant

  You are probably not handling atomic operations properly in your app, and probably have some nasty lurking race conditions. The worst part is these will get worse as your user count increases, are difficult to reproduce, and usually happen in your most critical pieces of code. (And no, your unit tests can’t catch them either.)

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