Jad Engine Blog : Personal

Changing jobs

Vicente — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 22:36:58 GMT

So, yesterday was my last day at C Tech Development Corporation. It was my last day as a freelancer too. These last three years have been a great learning experience, and I feel I have grown quite a lot as a developer.

I landed the job thanks to my work in the old Jad Engine, where I met Reed and Bengt, and I honestly think I have been very lucky to be working with them, along Adam and Devlin. They are very talented devs, and I have learned from each of them as much as I have been able. I am proud also of the product we have been build during this time: EnterVol, an ArcGIS plugin that adds volumetric analysis of chemistry/geology data. Internally EnterVol is a really interesting piece of software, using WPF, WCF, TPL,... It is rather complicated, but also full of very elegant design decisions and code. I really hope it brings lots of new customers to C Tech, they deserve it :)

I want to give a special mention to Reed, my boss. Reed Copsey is a Microsoft MVP in C#, maybe not as known as other famous people on that area, but he is one of the best (you can check Stack Overflow and see him in the first page of top users ;) Not only he is an outstanding developer, capable of facing any problem you throw at him (seriously, he can jump from DB, to graphics, to algorithms, to WCF, and not even blink), he has been also an outstanding boss. He has lead the team carefully, dividing the job, keeping an eye on us, helping when needed, and he has been more than understanding with some cultural differences that exist between Spain and USA, specially regarding holidays. Given how hard is to find a good boss, I really appreciate this.

And for the future? Well, I am moving to Plain Concepts, a Spanish Microsoft partner. I am very happy of this for several reasons. First and mostly, because of the people: I know quite a lot of people in the company from old jobs, Microsoft events,… It is always nice to work with people you know you already get along well, and even nicer when they are technical leaders in their fields. I hope I’ll learn quite a few new things from all of them. Oh, and the company average age is quite young too :)

Second, because Plain Concepts has just started developing games, via Weekend Game Studio. They have already released two games and are developing their own multiplatform game engine called Wave (which powers Bye Bye Brain). Wave is mostly the work of two people, one if them is Javier Canton, another fellow Spanish XNA/DX MVP. I really look forward working with them on the engine and improving it in the future. And releasing quite a few games :)

And third, because I’ll be moving to their Seattle office (if I get the visa, come on immigration), which is a huge change for me. I needed to get out of my comfort zone a little, and I wanted a change after been working so long remotely at home, and this achieves it by long. It also allows me to experience what it means to live abroad for a long time, something I’m very curious to discover.

So, one path ends, and another starts, I am really eager to discover how this new part of my life and professional career will develop.

Changing jobs was posted the 01/21/2012 at Kartones.Net.

Microsoft MVP Summit 2011

Vicente — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 19:48:49 GMT

Three years, three MVP Summits. And for me this was the best one so far. I arrived to Seattle on Sunday pretty tired, but just in time to go the typical Spanish MVP Dinner organized by our great MVP Lead Cristina.

It was great to meet all the other MVPs and some people who aren’t MVP anymore but live in the area or work in Microsoft Corp. Usually during the summit we have a ton of talks and events so we can’t see much each other. It’s also funny there are other Spanish MVPs I mostly see in Seattle, talk about crazy…

Then, on Monday, the Summit started. For the new people the Summit has two main things: the keynotes from the big bosses (Ballmer and the others) and the deep-dive sessions with our teams (where we usually see new shiny stuff).

The keynotes are always a little hit and miss. Ballmer is a great speaker, so his talk is always pretty fun to see, and the others depend: sometimes the topic is interesting, sometimes you don’t care much and you prefer spending the time doing a little networking.

The real meat is in the deep-dive sessions. This time we spent nearly 4 days reviewing the current state of the platform and getting information of what is coming next for XNA, WP7,… I can’t tell anything as everything is NDA, but believe me, things have look pretty well until now (probably much better than any of us was expecting, numbers of the platform were great), and will look much better in the future. In fact, of the three times I have been in Redmond this is the time I have come out more excited about what the future holds for XNA.

But of course everything is not perfect, and as usual we passed that feedback to the team. They are pretty aware of where they are doing well and where they are doing badly, but opposite to what some people may believe, they don’t have infinite resources at their disposal to fix and do everything we may want or need. They have a pretty big list of things to do, and they are tackling it as fast as they are able to.

Apart from that, another great part of the Summit is spending time with my peers. As usual I enjoyed the company of all the other XNA/DX MVPs, who are all very interesting in their own ways.

For example this farewell dinner with (left to right) Yuna, Richard, Michael, and myself (Yuna and myself are carrying the awesome XNA Jackets our team made for us, thanks!). I’m also pretty happy that at least another Spanish XNA MVP came to the summit, the great Inaki from the Simax driving simulator. The sad part is that I missed meeting some very cool people like Benjamin, Charles and Petri that couldn’t come this year.

Another great point of the Summit are the parties. We have a small, private one with just us and the XNA team (sometimes with MVPs from related categories, like WP7 this year). It’s a mix of drinking, and a mix of serious talk in a more relaxed way than in the deep-dive sessions. I had a lot of fun with an USA WP7 MVP whose name I don’t remember at all (he spoke Spanish!), Phil Bourke from Ireland, and Shawn, Nick, John, and Charles from the XNA team, who stayed with us and shared their point of view about a lot of interesting subjects. Thanks a lot people, I know you were super tired and you had to work next day but I am very grateful you stayed with us.

And then there’s a huge final party with all the people in the event (1500 MVPs plus guests). This year it was in the Safeco field, and it was pretty good (although I liked the Garage from last year more). I spent most of the time with the Korean MVPs and then doing the idiot outside with the rest of the Spanish people. There were also some famous baseball players from the Mariners, but well, baseball is not my thing really… Although Dong (XNA/DX MVP, Korea) was really into it:

(last two pictures are pretty crappy, sorry, the difference between a Nikon D90 and the Samsung Omnia camera with 3 extra drinks and no anti-shake…)

So, to summarize, a very interesting and fun summit. I really hope I can go next year, it’s one of the best parts of been a MVP.

And last, if you want the point of view of the Summit from other XNA/DX MVPs, you can check Andy, Catalin, Chris, and George thoughts (sorry if I have missed any of you).

Microsoft MVP Summit 2011 was posted the 03/16/2011 at Kartones.Net.

Memories of Vietnam

Vicente — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 05:21:00 GMT

(personal post, nothing related to XNA, .NET or game development here, sadly those posts will have to continue waiting, I’m stuck about writing technical stuff)

I have recently spent two weeks of holidays in Vietnam. Before the trip I was a little worried because of several things: I’m very picky with food, it was my first organized trip and I didn’t know what to expect (I like travelling on my own), it was my first trip to a country in development,… But in the end my fears were unfounded: the food was plenty and tasty, the travel group and our tour leader were great people, and Vietnam was an amazing place to visit. The country is beautiful, and the people hard-working, moving away from the ghosts of war.

But not everything was pretty, and there were some sad stories that crossed my path during this trip. One of the most touching happened in Sapa, a region in the north of the country.

That day our tour leader had organized a visit to a small village of one of the many hill tribes that live in Vietnam, the Red H’mong or Red Dzao, I can’t remember. Once we arrived there by bus, we were “greeted” by a swarm of women. I say “greeted” because what they were doing is deciding to which one of us they would try to sell their handcrafted goods, so they could organize and all of them didn’t try to sell to the same tourist, but split in small groups trying to get more sales from us. This is pretty common in the area of Sapa, and it had happened to us before around the hotel, so I wasn’t very surprised, although as usual it felt a little tiring knowing you would have someone following you during all the trip trying to sell you something again and again.

I got two old women, who sadly couldn’t talk much English, so even if I tried to get some information from them about their lives, I got nothing. They weren’t too friendly either and they made little effort to communicate, so after a while I decided to shut up and concentrate on taking pictures and enjoying the sights while ignoring the women shadowing me.

Once we got to the middle part of the trip, just before going back, the moment came to start bargaining and buy something from the women that had selected you. I got one thing from each woman and tried to get out of the group of people, because as soon as I said I was going to buy something, other people started saying that I should also buy from them because they had also talked with me during the trip or because they were friends. I started to argue and after getting a little angry and raising my tone, they stopped their complaints.

Then, I heard a voice joking at me: “it’s not true that you only talked with those two, but you can’t really buy from everyone.” I was taken totally by surprise: the voice was clearly Vietnamese, but it was the first time I have heard anyone from there speaking English so well. I turned around to find a girl in her early twenties (later I found she was 23). She was dressed as the older women, and she was also carrying a basket full of hand-made goods.

I presented myself and asked the girl name: Pah Me (no clue about the spelling, but she said the pronunciation was like the start of “Pamela”). I started talking with her, asking questions about her people and their ways of living. She was pretty easy to talk with, and eager to answer all my questions. After a while we started talking about other topics, and one thing appeared clear to me: the girl was pretty clever, it seemed a pity that she had to stay in the village farming rice and trying to sell her goods to tourists. So I decided to ask her if she had plans to go to university or any other form of higher education.

Then she told me that she couldn’t afford it, and that only one of her friends had been able to go to university, thanks to an Australian couple who had paid her the costs for studying. Intrigued, I asked her how much it was.

50 US dollars. A year.

I stopped right on my tracks after hearing the amount. I was probably carrying enough dollars with me at that moment to pay her a 4-5 years degree. It was tempting to say: “hey, take this, study and get outside this place”. Sadly things don’t work like that. After that moment, we continued chatting. For the girl it was business as usual, but for me things had turned more serious: the money I earn in a day could totally change the rest of the life of the person I was talking with, it was brutal to face the fact so directly, even if inside me I was aware of that reality before coming to her country.

Near the end of the way back, I told her I was going to buy something from her, and that I was really glad for all the things that she had told me. I really think that was a much better way to try to sell something to a tourist, although probably not all the women could speak English well enough for that. She started showing me her goods, and I got interested in a piece of cloth that women over there use for their weddings. I have a friend that is getting married next year and it would make a great gift for his girlfriend, so I asked for a price.

When I said that, she changed a little her way of speaking, resembling more the old women. It was a pity, because I thought that after the nice chat and asking myself for something to buy there was no need for using “merchant-speech”. She also said a pretty “high” starting price, but I had decided in advance not to bargain, so I accepted it without a word, although I was a little sad about how the whole situation had developed. I think she realized a little too late that there was no need for those things, as she suddenly offered me to take something else for free. I smiled at the gesture, appreciating its meaning.

After that, I asked one of the people of our group to take a picture of both of us and we continued exchanging stories until we arrived to the bus and I departed the village.

I have many other happy and sad memories of this trip that will travel with me for a long time, but I hope I will never forget this particular event. It remembered me how privileged I am for having the life I have, and how little I value it sometimes.

Memories of Vietnam was posted the 12/16/2010 at Kartones.Net.

Desarrollando un juego para Surface

Vicente — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 22:46:00 GMT

Este finde antes de irme de viaje he podido participar en otro “12 Meses 12 Proyectos”. 12m12p es una idea que se nos ocurrió a un grupo de amigos de Madrid de juntarnos de vez en cuando e intentar hacer un juego completo en un fin de semana. Normalmente no terminamos nada, pero nos lo pasamos muy bien :)

Esta vez se decidió hacer un juego de Air Hockey para Surface, ya que teníamos acceso a los SDKs de la mesita (aunque no teníamos una para probar, una lástima). Y sorprendentemente, conseguimos terminarlo y dejarlo bastante pulido :)

En este 12m12p participamos Luis, Riqui, Antón, Pedro, Olmo y un servidor y en el blog de Luis podéis encontrar varias imágenes y un vídeo de ejemplo. El juego está desarrollado en C#+WPF y nos agenciamos un HP TouchSmart para hacer las pruebas, pero a pesar de que soporta multitouch no reconoce cada toque como un ratón diferente así que acabamos poniendo varios ratones a un portatil normal para jugar.

La verdad que voy a echar bastante de menos 12m12p estos meses que voy a estar fuera, ya que son una oportunidad muy buena para vivir un proyecto (aunque sea pequeño) de principio a fin, donde lo que importa es terminar como sea la aplicación (si la gente viera algunas partes del código iban a llorar :p).

Desarrollando un juego para Surface was posted the 01/15/2009 at Kartones.Net.

DevCamp 08 – ¡Ira XNA!

Vicente — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 08:50:54 GMT

Con esta frase terminé mi conferencia de XNA en la DevCamp 08 de Microsoft, para quien no conozca a que película hicimos un guiño entre Pedro, Riqui y yo que vea este link :) La verdad que como siempre la organización del evento fue de 10, 90 frikis en el Trip de Guadalajara a cuerpo de rey.

Y sin enrollarme mucho más, aquí dejo las transparencias de mi presentación, por si alguien les quiere dar un vistazo.

XNA – Cómo facilitar el desarrollo de videojuegos

DevCamp 08 – ¡Ira XNA! was posted the 11/15/2008 at Kartones.Net.