IT Manager, Producer at Puny Human Games

When your side hustle in a fun industry becomes your main gig

When I assumed the platform operations manager position for WebAssign, I wanted a project to help keep my engineering skills sharp. This led me to offer IT operations support in my off-hours to Puny Human, a video game studio working on games both in-house and co-developed. While contracting with Puny Human, I modernized their application hosting stack and drastically cut their IT operational expenses by taking advantage of Docker and modern cloud hosting platforms. As the studio grew, I scaled their hosting strategy to a hybrid cloud model that allowed them to take advantage of both on-prem and cloud resources. This became a critical asset when the pandemic hit, as we already had the networking and server infrastructure ready to support a fully remote workforce.

Eventually, as Altair began to spin down, Puny Human offered me a full-time position, which formalized my role as the studio’s IT IT Manager as well as a consulting DevOps Engineer for their co-development arm. During my full-time tenure, I was part of Puny Human’s leadership team, providing mentorship for other engineers, and had the honor of working on “The Callisto Protocol”, a AAA title by Striking Distance Studios. Later on at Puny Human, I served as producer for Nexus.gg’s Game Engine Integration SDKs, where Puny Human developed maintainable SDKs for game studios to integrate with Nexus’ Support-A-Creator program.

Puny Human was taking a big bet on making their second game and was actively seeking funding for the project. Unfortunately, due to market forces and the state of the economy, we could not secure the funding needed to continue development, and the studio was forced to close. When one door closes, another opens, and I was fortunate enough to be offered a position at Notorious Studios.