Senior Software Engineer → Staff Software Engineer - Platform Operations at Notorious Studios

Let’s make our own Legacy

When news of Puny Human’s closure began to make the rounds, I was contacted by Notorious Studios, a AA studio lead by former Blizzard Entertainment veterans. They were building the game that would become “Legacy: Steel & Sorcery” and needed someone to own the server platform hosting story. Given my experience with building greenfield architecture in AWS, and my penchant for making cost effective, “boring” architecture choices that provide high reliability with sane complexity, we came to the conclusion that I’d be a great addition to the team.

I was excited to leverage more Infrastructure as Code tooling, which lead me towards Pulumi, a platform-agnostic Cloud Development Kit framework. I chose Pulumi because it leverages the pedigree of other IaC tools like Terraform with the beauty of taking advantage of Python’s native language semantics, making adding logic and testing simple. We were able to complete our deployment of Legacy’s backend well in advance of our early access date, which allowed us to battle harden our systems in advance of our launch and provide fantastic uptime to our global player base.

Like with many startups, I wear many hats, so in addition to owning the infrastructure platform for game hosting, I also own all of the company IT, development support and back office systems. I built a mesh VPN system used for site to site and client access with Tailscale. I also set up a cost effective hybrid cloud hosting environment for LOB and development application hosting. In addition, I manage licenses for our SaaS and Vendor Managed systems, and set the standard for information security and compliance for the studio.