NCSOFT

NCSOFT West has a long history of success in the online gaming industry. They have been in operation for over 20 years. In that time, they have won numerous awards and accolades. They are also one of the few publicly traded companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Their games include Guid Wars 2, Aion, Lineage 2, and City of Heroes, among others.

I started working for NCSOFT as a senior javascript developer. Bidirectional communication between the games and websites was one of the company's most ambitious goals. Some basic game data had already been exposed, but overall, the sites were mostly static. With each project, I would work with studio engineers to expose data via a read-only database or an API if we push data to the game.

NCSOFT relocated the development team to Seattle, WA, not long after I joined the company, where they planned to grow the team significantly. I was offered a position as a lead front-end developer and a relocation package to move to the Pacific Northwest. We had already been planning a wedding, which was exciting and added to the stress. In the summer of 2007, we got married and moved to Seattle to start a new chapter in our lives. Our office was on 4th street between Pike and Pine, so we were in the heart of downtown.

I was offered a development manager position approximately three years after joining the company. The team had grown to 18 developers in 3 countries, which included Java, PHP, and front-end developers, so it was a large team. I accepted the position with the agreement that we would bring on a technical project manager with a background in agile methodologies. When a shared team is supporting so many studios, all with competing priorities, it's essential to have a project manager that can interface with the studios. Over the next two quarters, we standardized our development pipeline following Agile and using Jira, Bamboo, and custom build processes.

I enjoyed my time working at NCSOFT. I significantly grew as an individual and drastically improved our productivity as a manager. Unfortunately, my time ended at NCSOFT when they moved the team again, this time to California.