Thirteen years building software. Seven leading the teams that ship it.

The studio is self-publishing a VR narrative game on Steam while still delivering client training work. Same six-person team on both tracks.

Engineering delivery. Scope and milestones, multi-headset builds for PC VR and Meta Quest, and the Steam Next Fest demo ahead of launch.

Running a title and client work at the same time only holds together if a commit reaches a playable build quickly. I brought in TDD, pair programming, and trunk-based development with automated tests in CI/CD.

An audio advertising SDK that had to reach a game through two very different native platforms, without the studio integrating it having to care about either.

The whole surface. A stable layer on top, real native libraries underneath in Java, Kotlin, Swift and Objective-C, and documentation precise enough that integration didn’t turn into a support conversation.

Code running inside someone else’s app carries their risk, not just ours. So automated end-to-end and integration tests went into CI/CD, and security and privacy standards became a condition of shipping.

A C# rewards and offerwall SDK for Android and iOS, taken on as a hands-on side role while managing a team full time.

Keep one foot in production code. Native plugins, telemetry and monitoring, locale management, and a versioned package distributed as a compiled binary.

Time. It only works because the scope is deliberately narrow and the release process is automated.

A released console title had to run on Google Stadia, a streaming runtime with its own performance envelope.

Treat it as measurement work, not feature work. Oversee the port, lead performance optimization and shader fixes, and hold the team to the platform’s budget.

Little of it is visible. The win is a frame that arrives on time, which nobody notices when it works.

MyWhoosh needed real smart bikes and trainers driving a cycling simulation. Bluetooth hardware, several manufacturers, three target platforms, and a team of 10+.

Own the tools layer as its own product. BLE plugins connecting the hardware, trainer-data displays exposing it inside the app, and release coordination with the wider app team, so gameplay engineers never had to think about Bluetooth.

Leading ten is a different job from leading four. It turned into planning, task assignment, code review and release coordination. First role where my own commits stopped being the point.

A voice note is easy to record and hard to use afterwards. I wanted one that came back as something I could act on.

The whole capture-to-action pipeline, built myself. Transcript, summary with key points, task list, plus product discovery, roadmap and implementation across the mobile app, web and cloud APIs.

Everything’s a trade-off when you’re the only engineer. I kept scope narrow on purpose. Shipping beat completeness every time.

A multiplayer title that also needed on-chain transactions. Real-time play wants low latency and stable session state. Blockchain is slow and can fail.

Keep them apart. Event-driven backend microservices and RESTful APIs for multiplayer logic and real-time chat, deployed and scaled on Google Cloud with Kubernetes, with monitoring and alerting. Wallet integration and Solana NFT minting sat behind that.

More moving parts to operate. Once it was distributed, the monitoring stopped being optional.

Tamatem Plus is Tamatem’s direct-to-consumer webstore and payment network for the MENA market, carrying 40+ local payment methods: e-wallets, carrier billing, cash and cards. It exists because a large share of the region is underbanked, so the usual store payment flow never reaches those players at all.

The SDK side. Connect Plus is what a game embeds to put its players in front of that platform, and my work was on making that integration easier for the game developers adopting it.

An SDK like this is judged on how little the integrating studio has to understand. Every local payment method behind it is somebody else’s API, and none of that complexity should surface in the game.