I was a Senior Production Engineer on Destiny: The Taken King.
Over the course of The Taken King development, I was the Product Owner and Architect for our multi-release studio-wide build assembly and syncing tools. This role required me to have a very broad understanding of every workflow in the studio. I also had to balance the urgent near term goals of The Taken King, with our long term technology goals for releases in 2016 and 2017. Despite having to affect multiple releases in all of our branches, the rollout of these tools was exceptionally smooth, and showed immediate and lasting increases in stability across the dev team.
The success of these tools has served as a model for the entire studio. My rollout plan became the new gold standard for internal tool deployments. The branch curation techniques we developed are now central to how our teams work. And our more recent studio reorg was specifically designed to support groups like mine prioritizing multiple in-development releases at once.
One of the things I’m most proud of is the foresight I was able to use to prepare our tools for future improvements. Because of my work on blue sky optimizations, we were able to deploy new perforce servers more than a year ahead of when we expected them, which allowed us to develop support for new rapid patching build types on very short notice.