I want to describe the anti-cheat system that we built without providing enough specifics that would allow people to bypass it. The new anti-cheat initiative had the following goals: We decided to built two separate anti-cheat systems: I named them both, so I’m not sure why one has a cool name and the other does not (although at one point somebody was calling the new…
I was made the technical lead for Niantic’s anti-cheat initiative. Before I describe the experience, it might be useful for me to describe Niantic’s anti-cheat problem. At the time that I joined Niantic, they only had two real games (Pokémon Go and Ingress), but they had additional games under development (including Harry Potter: Wizards Unite) and they really wanted Niantic to become a platform on…
After leaving Microsoft, I gave myself two months to find another job. I hit leetcode pretty hard and started learning about other areas (my entire career up to this point was kind of niche – not many people work on operating systems or programming devices drivers right now). I actually bought a book called Explain the Cloud like I’m 10 (it was a surprisingly informational…
I learned a lot while at Microsoft (I was there over 20 years – I better have!) There were a lot or REALLY smart and passionate people (which equated to a LOT of swearing 😊), but people were fair and apart from the initial brogrammer culture (which eventually improved), it was a great place to work. When I got promoted to a Senior Engineer, I…
When I started at Microsoft, Windows was the golden goose – it made lots of money and was extremely relevant. We even got labeled a monopoly by the DOJ (yay?) There was always lots of work to do that felt very important. By 2015, however, Apple and Linux had become very prominent, and we started charging less and less for Windows. Microsoft’s shift towards a…
Up to this point in my career, I had no major failures – every major project eventually worked as expected. Hardware based content protection broke my winning streak. The only good thing I can say about this experience was that I was able to work with some great engineers, such as Lucia Darsa and Hany Farag. DRM and content protection is almost a religious battle,…
DirectFlip was a great feature, but it only worked in limited scenarios (which never occurred on a Windows Phone, where the savings was the most important). Hardware that supported multiplane overlays, on the other hand, was usually capable of skipping the DWM composition step most of the time. For example, when watching a video with some controls on the screen like this: The video gets…
12/12/20 was our final day in Africa and we decided to do something slightly controversial. I’ve been working with the homeless in Seattle, and I wanted to better understand how things worked in Kenya. As it happens, Nairobi contains the 3rd largest “slum” in the world, which is called Kibera. As it turns out, there are a number of Kibera residents that offer tours. After…
12/19/2024 was the last day with the safari group. We had a flight from Malindi to Nairobi in the late afternoon, and everybody else took a connecting flight from there back home. But we decided to stay one extra day in Nairobi. We had to check out of our room at 11am, but they allowed us to hang out on the grounds until our shuttle…
I woke up early again on 12/18/2024 to attempt to take a great sunrise picture. It was cloudy again, and this was the best I could do shortly after sunrise: Thirty minutes later, I was able to capture this: The plan for the day was to visit the very small village of Oda, which is where Karen’s husband (Patterson) was born and raised (and he…
