[a1r]

My side project was to remake the Commodore 64 game, ENCOUNTER from scratch in three.js, adapted for both mobile and desktop. I got pretty far.

Then in 2017 I interviewed for an Engineering Manager role at Facebook (now Meta). The role was with a web performance team. I'd barely had time to prepare - at most a week - and my coding interview was not amazing.

In the final interview segment we were discussing web performance and I mentioned the ENCOUNTER project as running at 60fps. We pulled up the game on the interviewer's random Android phone and it worked well! It turned out the interviewer was a fellow C64 nerd and we bonded over shared memories.

I learned later that the project code was used as a tiebreaker to get signal on my coding ability. I'm working at Meta to this day!

Check it out at https://github.com/air/encounter