3 Bells!
I just had my 3rd Gaiaversary on the 5th. It's kind of a trip to think that I've been here for 3 years -- it's hard to remember life without Gaia in it, and I'm very thankful for all the great users here and all the awesome people I work with.
The first week I worked at Gaia was kind of a crazy one. I was running a pretty regular fever at that point, so the craziness of it all was pushing delirium. Our little office at the time was running out of room, so I was put into a cube that was used to store merchandise. I was surrounded by stacks of posters, hats, and t-shirts. My brain swirled as I tried to make sense of the code base and the site.
The first night I went home, my brain was flooded with Gaia. I couldn't close my eyes without seeing little avatars everywhere. I tried to go to sleep and just saw little avatars running around and forum posts pouring down a page like a waterfall. I wondered if maybe I shouldn't be working at a place that seems to have gotten under my skin so thoroughly.
Fortunately, the real fever broke and I caught Gaia Fever instead. The symptoms include senses of euphoria, insomnia, weight gain, weight loss, anxiety, fits of laughter, stress, delusions of grandeur, depression, headaches, fevers, delirium, and toxic levels of exposure to Anime.
Summer Event
As many of you know, ramoneguru has taken over Event development for the most part, with support from the entire Event team. They're in the middle of wrapping up the upcoming Summer Event. I can't tell you too much about it because it's no longer mine to give away juicy hints about. I can say that we've learned from past events, and I think we've come up with a much improved variation on an old theme.
Events are always a platform for us to experiment with something totally new, which from a product development standpoint is somewhat crazy. We don't know if it will work. We don't know if it will break the site. We don't know if it will be fun. We come up with a concept for something totally new and by a magic mix of instinct and experience we deliver an Event. We rarely have the chance to test an Event with more than a couple people at a time - so it's always a crapshoot whether or not it will work on a scale of 300,000 users rofl
Daily Chance Upgrades
Speaking of 3 years ago, I recently had an opportunity to rewrite the majority of the backend for Daily Chance (project name "Daily Candy", which is ridiculous in retrospect). It was my very first ground-up project when I started at Gaia, designed as a way to give users more items and give them something each day they logged in. Both Gaia itself and I were pretty green in terms of how we approached code for this huge site, and because of that the code for Daily Chance ended up pretty sloppy. It worked, it was robust, it had a pretty fancy testing suite (if I do say so myself) - but adding to it and modifying it was kind of a pain. Some stuff, it never did as well as it should.
So this most recent rewrite changed a lot of things, most of which (for now) will be transparent to users. Here's a rundown anyway! :
Daily Chance administration is much easier now, so adding/removing rewards is much easier, faster, less error-prone. We also now maintain backups of every past Daily Chance list, just in case.
Much more security. Before, if you were crafty enough, you could get all the Daily Chance sections by modifying a single URL, including ones that were disabled, backups, pending, flash-based, etc. This kind of stuff is no longer as possible.
Daily Chance had a predefined set of reward types (gold, random item, tokens, tickets, random fish, random ink, etc. etc.). Now adding new types is much, much easier. Some stuff that may be planned include: orbs, random ring, zomg ingredients, nothing (I can't believe we didn't have this before!), simple grant, limited items (e.g., there might only be 100 of a particular item available each day), crafting items (if we make an alchemy system), random aquarium fish, pms from NPCs, and quests. A usual but apparently necessary disclaimer: This is all speculative, and NONE of it is a "promise".
A number of performance improvements
I still have some enhancements to make (changing logging so it scales better as the site grows and so we can do more accurate reporting on all the data, and bringing more of the code up to current standards) but a massive amount has been done already.
For a software engineer like me, rebuilding one of your own old systems to a renewed state of elegance is one of the most gratifying things you can do. It's like taking any piece of art you've done in the past (a song, a drawing, a painting, a piece of writing) and then redoing it closer to your original vision with new skills you've developed. It may not achieve 100% of your original vision, but it's one step closer to being perfect. In a way, to be a little overblown, it's like coming one step closer to realizing your dreams.
More to come
I actually wrote a huge update, but I decided to cut it in half so I'd have something else to post soon, and give you more time to digest and comment on the stuff in here rofl More updates soon!
UPDATE 7/23/2009 9:41 AM PST: Regarding "Nothing" in the Daily Chance, I wasn't suggesting that this be a part of the main Daily Chances - but it's a useful option to have when we use it on implementations of the system, such as the Skittles Prize Wheel or the Sour Patch Kids candy truck.
Community Member
I think I have the Gaia Fever, and there's no cure. gonk heart
I can't wait for the Summer Event, yay! >w< -Foams at mouth.- scream heart