Posted April 14, 2020 by soapbubble
Hi all!
So last week I was let go from my job at a small startup that made multiplayer retail VR gaming experiences. I was a great job where I both had a lot of fun and learned a whole bunch. Over the ~8 months I was there I completely rebuilt most of their online cloud architecture as well as adding a bunch of cool things like leaderboards and memberships along the way. However as a company they were making no money with all of their stores closed for weeks and apparently closed for weeks more. The really is no worse business in a pandemic than one that revolves around sticking blindfolds on people and putting them in a room right next each other. Anyway... the company shedded people with a few layoffs and it was looking like I was going to be in the "hibernation squad" as the company tries to not die but in the end the company shut down all US engineering.
This leaves your truly suddenly with a whole bunch of free time. Naturally I spent the first bits applying for new jobs. This is m first time doing this in 20 years because all jobs from my first job out of college were from acquisitions, spin-off, tech transfers or they contacted me. So this is very much a new experience for me. However I am pleased to report that the response has been very good. Some are even interesting. So while I am unemployed, I have been spending 2-5 hours as day in interviews or responding to email.
I could be working on Morpheus but instead I've been working with the wife on her business tech and my old Twitch app which I've been wanting to polish a bit. I am streaming Tuesday through Friday 2-3:30pm CDT at https://www.twitch.tv/captemulation where I work on it. My plan is go back to Morpheus development after I add a few more things to the Twitch app and get it deployed again.
Tech interviews are very much a multi-stage process so it probably won't be a week or two before I can get hired again so there is plenty of time to be able to really dedicate some quality time. The reason I picked up the Twitch app is that I was really itching to build a Twitch app for my last job as they were experimenting with a twitch stream and some competitive multi-player VR games. Since I never got to it I wanted to at least work with my old Twitch app a little bit more.