NDA's

Wow. How do I communicate all the cool things I'm doing at work without saying what I'm doing? Everyone is asking me how my first week of work went, and I struggle. Well I start off with, "Work is really fun!" and then that ends up being the whole conversation.

But I guess I can spend this time going into more detail. So far, I've been assigned solely to Hellgate:London. What makes work so enjoyable, is that it's a great mix of creativity and problem solving. It's easy to come up with cool ideas to improve the game. What's harder though, is designing something cool with limitations. I have to be able to create something new and innovative but with using as few of our programmer's resources/time as possible.

Sometimes I feel I'm in the middle of a tug-o-war at work. I basically have 2 bosses. One which is like a creative lead, who I brainstorm with and we settle on cool things to add to the game. Then we have the guy who's in charge of assigning tasks to the programmers. And he basically shuts down every idea we have. "We don't have time for that!" "That guy is swamped with the UI improvements!" "I have two programmers out on vacation next week!" But in a lot of ways it's good, it really helps me think out of the box, because I have a cool idea, but I need to figure it out within the limitations of the system.

Which, personally, I love these types of tasks, and think I actually excel at these type of things. Everywhere in computer science, there's this concept of a "blackbox" . That is, you have this mysterious black box, you don't know anything inside of it. All you know is you give it something, and it'll then spit something out. You then have to be able to do something else using the blackbox.

Toy Problem Example: You have a biased coin that doesn't have 50/50 odds. Instead, you get heads with probability p, and tails with probability 1-p. How do you use that coin to be able to get 50/50 odds? (Hint: The answer doesn't rely on the value of p)

So, getting back on track, I constantly want to do wacky things. The challenge I encounter at work, and what makes it fun, is figuring out how to do that within the bounds of the system.


Hmm, I digressed a lot, maybe I should of labeled this post BlackBox instead of NDA. But yeah, being under an NDA is very annoying, since what I'm doing at work is so cool and fun, I just want to tell everyone else!