Paul Irish

Awesome! (h/t Alex)

Splashnology

I originally assumed jQuery used a timer for each animate() too…

• Agricola
• Battlestar Galactica
• Citadels
• Family Business
• Formula D
• Galaxy Trucker?
• Ghost Stories
• Gubs
• In the Year of the Dragon
• Incan Gold
• Power Grid
• Through the Ages
• Ticket to Ride
• Viktory II
• Winner’s Circle

Video Games

• BlazBlue
• Contra 3
• Dokapon Kingdom
• Final Fantasy X (yup, finally)
• Knights in the Nightmare
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii
• No More Heroes
• Rhythm Heaven
• Scribblenauts
• Viewtiful Joe 2

Computer Games

• Cave Story?
• Diablo II

Facebook Games

• Atom Blast
• Ball Toss!
• Brain Buddies
• Café World
• Crazy Planets
• Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures
• FARKLE
• FarmVille
• Kick-off
• Mafia Wars (for obvious reasons)
• Mobsters 2 (ditto)
• Mythmonger
• Ninja Saga
• Ponzi, Inc
• Roller Coaster Kingdom
• Spore Islands
• Starfleet Commander ( rank #143 >:D )
• Tetris Friends
• The Hierarchy
• Treasure Mania (now named Treasure Madness)
• Warstorm
• Yakuza Lords

I had been contemplating the move for a few years already. At one point, summer 2008 was my personal deadline for the move. Then my project kept getting delayed and I pushed it back to fall 2008. Then Lehman Brothers went bust and the global financial machine seized up. Suddenly, just having a job felt quite nice.

But as spring came around again, I decided I was not happy with the way things were going and needed to make a change. Last week of May, I told my boss of my intent to quit and applied for the web designer position at Zynga (through Bigi; did you get your referral bonus yet?). First week of June, I was interviewed for web developer (not design) position at Zynga. Second week of June, I was given an offer from Zynga and immediately accepted. June 30th was my last day at Power Integrations; the following Monday, July 6th, was my first day at Zynga.

Six months later, I’ve established myself as the CSS expert and sole UI-centric developer on the team. While that means I’m assigned all the awesome IE6/7 CSS bugs, I have also been given the opportunity to do my own layouts and mockups, tasks normally reserved for the UI designers. Taking a concept from design to code—what I’ve long been doing as a hobby—is now my career.

I’m incredibly fortunate that this change has worked out so well for me. There were many places where things could have gone wrong or I could have come up short. If it weren’t for Bigi, maybe my resumé would’ve been screened out by a recruiter looking for web designers instead of ending up in the hands of the team manager, who decided that I’d be a better fit for web development. If it weren’t for the people I’ve met at TIC/AIC/TVA, I probably wouldn’t have pursued web design with the same grit and dedication. And of course, if it weren’t for Lloyd and AIC ten years ago, would I even be talking about this now?

I think the takeaway is best summed up in a snippet of the Burnham quote Gruber ended today’s post with: “Make big plans; aim high in hope and work”. That is my resolution for 2010. I hope it is yours too.

John Resig

Particularly relevant to what I’m working on.

The New Yorker

Another juicy Gladwell piece.

• Ate a lot of good food.
• Played Agricola, Dominion, Through the Ages, Tsuro, Vegas Showdown, and Magic (Time Spiral block draft) with coworkers.
• Nerf wars at the office. Nerf raid on the FarmVille team.
• Placed 6th and 3rd at the monthly company Texas Hold’em tournaments.
• Worked all weekend twice…

I’ve noticed that the game room doesn’t have that many games though—even though it has the full set of Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3. Perhaps I should lead a project to change that. ;)

37signals

Especially relevant now. (via Kottke)