Tom Kerr is a Software Engineer
Hi. I like being a software engineer. It's fun. I work at Riot Games and I'm having a blast. Lately, I've been working on our new client. Usually that means C++, js, and web services. Things are always changing, though. I've worked on the game, it's statistics pipeline, the boards, and big-data analytics infrastructure type stuff. I enjoy reading about language design and machine learning.
League Client Update
Engineers enjoy daydreaming about rewriting everything from scratch, but fully rewriting an existing piece of software is a difficult thing for an organization. Working on LCU made me realize why, I think. The new tech is pretty cool though and it certainly will be more sustainable.
My team worked on the lobby screen where you invite everyone to your team. I took over the C++ backend plugin for lobby and have enhanced it to support everything we need. We have been using that to develop some new features that will streamline getting your friends into game with you.
Riot Games: ElastiCache in the Wild
I gave a talk at AWS re:Invent this year. I talked about how a couple of teams at Riot use Redis and how it helps us create player value. I was well out of my comfort zone doing this and I'm still not sure what I think of it. It was definitely a new experience for me.
Match History
Match History let's players see a bunch of cool stats for games. I implemented a large portion of the service backing the site. It pulls information from a handful of sources (LegS and chat) and produces the appropriately scrubbed data. Player's see different information for their own games, their friends games, and for the general public's games.
Find Your Friends
Find Your Friends links your facebook friends and lets you add them in League. I did a lot of varied jobs on this project; project setup, air development, testing, and maintenance tooling. I was mostly playing support. Writing testing around facebook's API was an adventure. The extra layer of abstraction generated because facebook users may not give permissions was interesting to say the least.
Games Blog
Activity
Interesting
Internets
These are my internets, though I'm not particularly active at any one of them.