Iceland ahoy!
As of Monday I have become a resident of the great city of Reykjavík, Iceland. I left behind my (most recent) home in San Francisco so that I could come work from the office here. It may sound crazy, but the opportunity to be out here and work for CCP was just too great to pass up. Cool people, cool software, and of course lots of bree!
The trip was not without its issues, of course. In the company tradition I managed to lose my passport in the airport and was unable to board my flight to Iceland for two days while I recovered the damned thing. Oh well, at least I got to visit Boston again. (And I thought the BART was bad!)
Anyway, I know there's a bunch of you out there: anybody who is interested in coming to work for CCP, we are hiring! I am plugging the fact that we are doing a lot of hiring both in Reykjavík as well as in Atlanta. You can see what we need here:
On the other hand, if you are interested in contributing to the universe of EVE but don't have the exact experience we're looking for or don't particularly want to move from wherever you are, I highly encourage you to investigate the Interstellar Services Department (ISD) - our group of outstanding volunteers. There are several different departments in the program with all sorts of tasks. Read more.
And now into the routine - but this is probably what you care about more, eh?
- Forum portrait rendering
Well - this is up and running and I've heard of no problems for months now. It still involves some manual work every time we roll a new patch, but it's much better now. Thanks to t20 for pushing this particular ball to the checkered flag.
- Character sheet disabled frequently
Apparently this used to be a problem, according to my last blog. I haven't heard of this happening at all in the past couple of months. I'm going to mark this as resolved and kick it off of my watch list.
- Item database not updated
Yeah, I said "done this week" but it got pushed off in favor of some other projects. (And then I went away for a couple of months before moving to Iceland.)
There's no technical reason this isn't done. I updated all of the generator scripts to work with Revelations. I've got a fully updated version of the item database on our staging server, too. Of course, half of the market groups say "see Content for description" which isn't really something we want to push live. Now that I'm back in the office I can start poking people with sticks. I'll start with something small and work my way up to a sharpened two-by-four.
- Alliance page generation automation
This one is waiting on me. I could regenerate it as a one-off again, but I'd rather actually fix the outstanding problems with it. Right now it's completely useless as a page - it takes forever to load and contains so much information that you don't even need. I am going to take a small bat to it and make it into some sort of "Top 10 Alliances by Population" page and then have the other alliances in a much smaller list that you can click through to the detail pages.
Anyway, the timeline is "real soon now". It's not my top priority but it's in the short list.
- Assorted changes/random things/"whatever we can trick Garth into doing"
Adding the ability for moderators to lock a signature, investigating some issues with the cache not clearing properly when you update a news post, working on extricating the forums from using the TQ database, etc. Maybe nothing that players will ever really see, but things that make our lives easier and allow us to do things easier.
- New data export pages
I'm trying to get approval for some very quick and dirty data export pages. The idea is to provide some information in an XML format that outside developers can use to create interesting tools with.
I'm hoping to make the lives of some people who are doing things like the influence map and outpost alert much easier. It would also be really cool to see what other sites can do given more useful and timely information. So we'll see. I'll let you know how this goes in my next blog.
And that's it. Enough of my rambling for today. See you again in a few weeks when I update everybody on life in Reykjavík (and the Web Cell)!
