[drakonka]

I started making my own websites when we moved to the US and got our first computer. I ended up doing some free web design and development as a teenager for local bands and record companies, in exchange for merch. After high school in Australia, I applied for a Junior Programmer role at a games company that just opened up in my city. I was very enthusiastic, but entirely unqualified to be a games programmer. I was called in to interview for a QA role instead, and was hired for that. After that company went down I freelanced doing web dev for small local businesses and government agencies.

There was not much of a stable games industry in my country at the time, so I got my Australian citizenship in order to apply for a Working Holiday Visa to Sweden. I spent a year learning how to make JavaScript games with an engine called ImpactJS to build a portfolio and learn to make games rather than just websites. After moving to Sweden in 2012, I started applying for jobs through local game company sites. I applied for a Build Engineer role at a large game company, as judging by the role description it seemed to be a good middle ground between my previous games QA work and more technical scripting and coding work. From there I picked up as many programming (in addition to build script and machine management) tasks as I could to keep focusing in that direction.

After shipping the first project in build I moved to tools dev, then engine dev, backend dev, now frontend dev (back to web stuff, we've come full circle!) It's been a lot of fun.