About Me

I'm a 37-year old software professional and was the Lead Platform Engineer for R Studios, previously Rumble Entertainment. Unfortunately, on 12 July 2024, R Studios' parent company, Forte, announced the immediate shutdown R Studios. All 33 of our employees were laid off and out of work as a result. I'm currently seeking my next challenge. I'm actively interested in backend or API development, engineering management, and API documentation / technical writing positions.

Please check out my resume if you're interested in seeing what I can offer! Or, if you're technically-minded, my Github page has most of my recent programming work available.

On 03 July 2024, I finally published my memoir and cookbook, Quarantine chez Maynard! I spent over four years working on it to make it a reality, and it's finally here. Even if my personal journal doesn't sound terribly interesting to you, I guarantee the recipes at the very least can be a highlight!

I have a few sample recipes on my Portfolio page if you'd like to try some out!

At age five, when most kids wanted to be firefighters or astronauts, I had other aspirations. I distinctly remember a brief exchange with my father one evening while shopping at Lunardi's Supermarket. My father started the conversation:

What do you want to do when you grow up? my dad asked.
I want to make Mario games! And I'll make better ones than [what we have on the NES]! I replied.
Well with that attitude, I'm sure you'll make the best Mario game there is!

Of course, back then I didn't really have an understanding of everything that went into developing software. Even so, as a young kid, I liked to think about how video games worked, and the challenges of writing code - once I knew what code was - to make them.

Eventually, I shelved the thought of making games professionally in favor of other career goals, including possible professions in education, psychiatry, and law. Each had its own merits, but as I explored each of them, I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. Due to my wide variety of interests, I began my studies at the University of Redlands as a Chemistry major, later transitioning to Government, Asian Studies, and finally, to Computer Science in my junior year.

Though I had taken a Java course in high school, it wasn't until my first class in C++ three years later that my passion for programming really set in. Unlike my previous forays into various fields of study, Computer Science regularly presented me with difficult challenges which often required a degree of creativity to solve; I was hooked! I excelled in Computer Science, carrying a departmental GPA of 3.65, and I took every CS course that was offered as long as I could fit it into my schedule.

After graduation, I started working for IDEC Corporation at their Sunnyvale campus, a company I had interned with in Osaka, Japan over a previous summer. I learned some sysadmin basics, developed a love for relational databases, and enjoyed automating tasks to improve the efficiency of the IT department. It was at IDEC that I began my journey into C# and SQL.

After three years at IDEC, I joined Ten 90 Studios, a digital studio with a small but talented team of artists and developers. Ten 90 was a great experience, partly because the work environment felt more like family than coworkers. I familiarized myself with front-end development on marketing demo applications using HTML5, JS, AS3, and Haxe. When the time came to deliver our projects, I anxiously watched televised conferences of clients showing off our work in front of thousands of attendees. I'm proud to say that we didn't have any mishaps!

During my time at Ten 90, we pursued a mobile game contract. I accepted responsibility to set up the backend for the game, as no one else in the company had any prior experience with it. With the C# and SQL Server knowledge I gained at IDEC, I was confident we could move beyond mostly front-end development for simple applications into a full-stack software cycle.

This project evolved into Cisco Geek Factor: an IT-heavy trivia game for both iOS and Android. Though the game is no longer available, you can check out screenshots here.

My professional adventures took me to another small team at HiT Software, a company best known for its flagship product DBMoto, a relational database replication tool. There I acted as the lead developer for customer support, added script editors, and limited HDFS support.

I then started Silicon Valley Shogi Club, with plans to become a nonprofit and teach after-school classes, run paid tournaments, and work with vendors to create our own physical shogi sets. We grew from 4 regular attendees to 25, and were set to join the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival for some great visibility - but the pandemic nearly killed off the club. The dream of turning shogi into a business began to fade.

I returned to software - though with COVID-19 disrupting markets it took me some time to find a job - by joining Rumble Entertainment in May of 2021. I was quickly recognized for my talents as a Platform Engineer and promoted to Lead shortly thereafter. I wrote a suite of microservices for the company's new game, Towers & Titans, ranging from chat, logins, and leaderboards, among many others. I also managed dedicated backend and web engineers. Unfortunately, Rumble announced a complete shutdown on 12 July 2024, laying off all of its employees. If you're interested in checking out the codebase I worked on, I was granted permission to open-source most of my hard work I put into Rumble, and you can browse my projects on my Github page at your leisure.

I'm now searching for my next challenge!

When I'm not buried in code, you can find me traveling the world, mastering the art of cooking, fiddling with Photoshop, studying shogi, or exploring virtual worlds with a game controller in my hands!