What, really?

Jeff Atwood/Coding Horror

What Jeff Atwood is missing the complete point of (in the second tweet) is that the deployment system is sweet, and a successful “3d chat game” requires some amazing pieces of engineering required to pull it off. We have a 3d desktop application, a chat service, a giant catalog, a very high-traffic site, and an always-increasing number of persistent users.

Shame?

As far as what IMVU is: IMVU is a service supplying a need, and making people happy in the process. A lot of people. It’s an MMORP without the rules-based G.

I can speak, however, to being a software engineer at IMVU in much more detail, as I spend many more hours engineering than I do as a user of the service. The number of interesting things to do at IMVU as an engineer is endless: Do you want to work in C++ today and play with the deep guts of 3d implementation and optimization? Would you like to work in python and use a really cool task system? How about some Flash that’ll be used daily by a horde of customers, or the infrastructure to allow those customers to make (and sell) their own flash for other customers to use in the product? Interested in scalability problems and other large-scale optimizations or the infrastructure and strategies needed to allow for making changes to a truly titanic amount of data? Or maybe just work on new and better things that will make customers, real people, happy?

Want to be in a functional business environment yet, as a team of engineers, ship code fifty times a day to a live and heavily used service?

We do these things every day. It’s engineering candyland.

I work at IMVU, and I’m damned proud of it mister Atwood.