2022 review - work
I've been a web developer at ArenaNet for quite a while - it's been 10 years this February - and this last year has been whirlwind, with some notable highlights.
Steam
We finally launched Guild Wars 2 on Steam! This project had been in development for a few years; we'd prepared to launch it the previous year, but pulled back to focus on the third expansion: End of Dragons.
End of Dragons launched in February 2022, and once the release stabilized in early spring, the work for Steam picked back up.
Web team had 6 major responsibilities to support Steam release:
- in-game currency
- launcher and game login
- account management site
- upgrades
- in-game restrictions
- in-house support site
The first 3 items - purchasing currency, logging into the game, and the account management site - had all been through QA prior to the release of End of Dragons. Those features were thought to be mostly complete. But the closer we got to the launch date the more we uncovered unexpected work. Without going into the details let's just say that the last month/days/hours before launch felt hectic!
Having well understood, and clearly defined specs would have been a huge benefit here.
When launch day came, everyone was both excited and nervous. All my last minute code changes were deployed the night previous; the only thing left today was to update some configs. The time came, I updated the configs, and started monitoring logs and comms, waiting to jump on any fire that arose.
But there were no fires. Which, at the time felt very concerning. Are the error logs working? Can people even log in? Did I miss something crucial? But there just weren't any major issues. Thousands of new players were logging in and playing Guild Wars 2 for the first time. That day I had a single bug fix, to correct default currency for non-US regions.
It was another successful launch and a huge relief. I'm really proud of what we delivered.
As always there's room for improvement, mainly these three areas: balancing work load across the team, not over-committing, and adhering to proper milestones.
New hire
This year our team grew from 2 to 3, including myself. A small team by any measure.
Not to scope-creep this post, but let's go back to February 2019 when the web team - like the rest of ArenaNet - was affected by company-wide layoffs. We went from 6 devs down to 2. I was one of the lucky 2, and it was... a lot. I was now the most senior web dev, and responsible for many important game features. For the next 2 years it was a struggle to stay on top of bugs, feature requests, and upgrades.
In late 2021 we lobbied for additional headcount, and got approval for 2022.
It had been years since the last time we hired; this meant rewriting the job description (focused on autonomy, creativity, rapid pace, and the fun of working in games), and updating the hiring process (1-2hr take-home test, followed by 4 rounds of 1hr interviews, both technical and personality). It must have worked because we ended up with a really smart, amicable dev.
At the time of hiring, our team was part of the platform team, comprised of server and web, with the most senior server dev also the team lead. I was still largely responsible for our small web team, and consequently, integrating this new hire on our team. I actually quite enjoyed this; finding the right balance of work, the pace of learning, required process, what's fun and what's work. Making collaboration successful.
There were lessons learned; don't be too cautious with workload. Keep pushing work, and see where progress is made, then lean into that direction.
Lead
Our team structure changed shortly after Steam launch - I was made lead of the web team. I was already the senior member of the web team, so this more of a title change than role change, but I was glad to receive recognition for my work.
I'll probably have more to say about this in another year.