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        Arimaa >> General Discussion >> Dropping in to say hello!
        
(Message started by: IdahoEv on Dec 5^th, 2008, 6:47pm)

Title: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by IdahoEv on Dec 5^th, 2008, 6:47pm

Hey friends! After seeing Karl's (exciting!) note about Z-Man games on BoardGameGeek, I just dropped in to see how my favorite game community is doing.

I'm very pleased to see that Zombie is in the ladder now, and it's really exciting that new entry OpFor is at the top!

Anyway, I miss you guys and am glad the community is still thriving. I've been away for a while - and will continue to be away for a while - because my business has grown dramatically the last few months and I'm pretty much working all the time. But that's good news, because the resulting financial stability means I may be able to come back and pick up work on developing Zombie next year. In June (before I vanished), I was about 75% finished converting Zombie from C to Java to make it easier for me to work on it, and I'd developed a long list of things to try to see if they resulted in strength improvements. That list is still in my filebox waiting for the free hours to show themselves.

Sorry I haven't been around much, but I promise you Arimaa is still in my heart!

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by chessandgo on Dec 6^th, 2008, 4:14am

Be well then ! Looking forward to have you coming back and making Zombie even scarier :-)

Jean

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by Fritzlein on Dec 6^th, 2008, 6:34am

It is great to hear that you are still hovering Evan, and even better to hear that your business is booming despite the tough economic times. I look forward to having you back on a regular basis, with money in the bank ;).

We measure the growth of the Arimaa community by games played or simultaneous logins or other forms of participation, but I think that all of our measures tend to understate the community in some way. People like you and PMertens and robinson all drifted away due to real life, not due to getting tired of Arimaa, and therefore will probably be back some day, some way. Our community of inactive but interested players gets larger every year, and I think we will feel the power of that passive support over time.

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by Janzert on Dec 6^th, 2008, 11:57am

Nice to see you again Idahoev. Hopefully you can get some time to come back and play again as well as developing Zombie further.

Janzert

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by IdahoEv on Dec 6^th, 2008, 5:13pm

on 12/06/08 at 06:34:14, Fritzlein wrote:

It is great to hear that you are still hovering Evan, and even better to hear that your business is booming despite the tough economic times.

I think, in some ways, that it may actually help my business. When a business is looking to cut back during a recession, an external freelancer is pretty inexpensive relative to a full-time software engineer for whom you'll need to pay salary and benefits. Especially if what you're considering is launching a big new web application that will be have a lot of work up-front to build it but less later on. An employee you'll have to keep paying even once there's less for him/her to do.

It also helped that a friend convinced me to switch from PHP to Ruby on Rails a year ago - the market for Rails is still pretty hot at the moment and all my biggest current jobs are referrals from him.

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by omar on Dec 7^th, 2008, 11:41pm

Nice to hear from you Evan. I was beginning to wonder what happened to you. It's good to know that things are getting better for you.

Funny you should mention Rails. About a month ago I evaluated a bunch of web frameworks and found Rails to be the one I like the most. It's good to know someone in the Arimaa community is using it regularly.

Can't wait to have back. We really miss your input in the forum.

Title: Re: Dropping in to say hello!
Post by IdahoEv on Dec 8^th, 2008, 2:06pm

on 12/07/08 at 23:41:55, omar wrote:

Funny you should mention Rails. About a month ago I evaluated a bunch of web frameworks and found Rails to be the one I like the most. It's good to know someone in the Arimaa community is using it regularly.

Feel free to email or chat me up if you need any thoughts or advice; I have over a year of professional experience in it now. After so many years of PHP, hand-written javascript, and untested code it's really great to be using a framework that does more of the work for me and has nicely integrated unit testing. (I use rspec with autotest for continuous testing these days).

Quote:

Can't wait to have back. We really miss your input in the forum.

And I miss contributing! I'll be around more in the spring, I hope.