Library
Presentations, interviews, and talks
Creating guardrails for AI agents video
O'Reilly Radar · 2025
This is an annotated version of my AI talk for O'Reilly Radar, "You Wouldn't Let a New Developer Sling Code at Production Without Guardrails, Right?!?"
I talk improving writing code with AI agents: using Git hooks to validate results, running multiple agents simultaneously with Git worktrees, implementing deterministic simulation for instant bug reproduction, sandboxing AI to protect your credentials, reducing context window waste, and utilizing agents with restricted capabilities.
Here's a PDF version also.
Writing reliable online game services
Game Developers Conference · 2012
This is an annotated version of my 2012 GDC presentation.
In the days of single-player games each crash would inconvenience one player. Now 5000 get kicked from the server when a crash occurs. To maintain the same frequency of crashes we have to write software that is 5000 times more reliable. That's why reliability is critical.
Here's a PDF version also.
Protecting your MMO from hackers
Game Developers Conference · 2010
This is an annotated version of my 2010 GDC presentation, "Developers vs. cybercriminals: Protecting your MMO from online crime".
There are people who want to destroy your online game for fun or profit. Our job is prevent those griefers and hackers from destroying the experience for the rest of our players.
Building online services (interview with Casey Muratori) video
HandmadeCon · 2015
Renowned game industry developer Casey Muratori interviews me about multiplayer game systems and network architecture.
We discuss the complexities of building online games, and discuss the server architecture and implementation of Guild Wars, and the game design tradeoffs we made to create a persistent MMORPG with no monthly fee.
Here's the transcript also.
Bringing Tera to the West (publishing an MMO) video
Interview · 2012
Ed Park (@taugrim) interviews me about the complexity of bringing Tera, a Korean MMORPG game, to the West.
Bringing a game developed in Asia and publishing it in North America is a complex endeavor. Player sensibilities are different, so design considerations abound. And building a publishing organization requires staffing for design, production, public relations, community, marketing, customer support, analytics, security, finance, HR, localization, and more.